y i teech writting

I discovered that I can write when I was a senior in high school. My AP English teacher assigned a mammoth literary analysis, the grade for which would determine my grade for the class. Being determined to make a good grade for the class, I poured myself into the assignment. My diligence paid off when I saw his comments about my opening paragraph; “Stupendous!” It was not until that moment that I really connected the writing I did for English class with “real” writing. To me, writers kept journals, composed poetry, and penned elaborate short stories filled with fairies. I did none of those. I wrote when assigned to do so, and that was that. After seeing my teacher’s comments about my work, I realized that what I wrote, regardless of its purpose, was good. Really good. Even if I was analyzing Slaughter-house Five, I could manipulate the language to make it sound, and look, interesting. I found that I had a knack for flow and clarity; I was communicating! And isn’t that what all writing really is?
In college I found my writing niche: creative nonfiction. Again, it was the play of words that allowed me to connect these assignments with true writing. As I played with words, I realized that that is what students need to feel free to do, as well. Writing assignments rarely move beyond the dreaded five-paragraph essay, where everything has to be in perfect order and there can only be three points. No wonder kids hate writing! My passion has become engaging students in the writing process by tapping into their creativity and using that to create authentic pieces to fulfill any given purpose.
I obviously was born at the right time, because the technology available to me and my students enables me to do just that. Rather than write an essay about American Romantic poetry, I have them create digital essays on theme. Rather than be limited to pictures from magazines, I have them scour the web for images to create an autobiography. Rather than sit around and discuss novels in class, they blog about the works on our class website. Basically, I’m trying to meet my students where they are. They live on MySpace.com, and so we blog and create MySpace-esque pages for some of the characters we study. They spend hours on IM, so I allow them to create dialogues in that format. They will write a five page note to a friend instead of a five line assignment, and so I allow rough drafts to be in “teen-speak” (abbreviations, unique spellings, etc). All I really want them to do is write, I don’t really care how they do it. Just like I couldn’t disconnect my staid essay writing from “real” writing, neither can I disconnect communicating with computers from communicating with pen and paper. It is all writing, just with different purposes and audiences.
Taking Technology and Writing was, in many ways, a validating experience for me. I use many activities each day that follow the theory we discussed, but I never had that research to back up my philosophy. Learning more about those things gives me justification for continuing to teach writing and technology as integrated subjects. It also gives me ammunition when another teacher backs away from using technology, calling it “fluff” or “cheating.” Using iMovie to create a project is no more fluff than making a poster over the same topic; referring to citationmachine.net is no more cheating than referencing a dictionary. Unfortunately, until technology is as much a part of everyone’s life as are pencils, there will be those who oppose using technology to teach. The presentations in class gave me a taste of some of the many sub-topics associated with technology and writing, and gave me inspiration to try new technologies in my classroom. I do wish that we could have used more of the technology in class instead of just talking about it in theoretical terms. I also would have liked the opportunity to create writings to share, but, of course, that’s the writer in me. I look forward to incorporating all that I have learned in this class (even the dreadful video production techniques!) into my curriculum. Perhaps I can convince my students that all communication is writing, including that communication that does not include words, even if I couldn’t convince my classmates of it.