Using Technology to Motivate and Facilitate Writing

During our last literature unit, in addition to several forms of "individual" writing (reader response logs, reader sketchbooks, and dialectical journals), I asked my students to engage in a thoughtful bi-weekly email dialogue with a classmate in which they reflected on the reading, discussed ideas, questions, confusions and shared successful comprehension strategies. Over the course of 6 weeks, they were required to send each other 12 emails of about 150 words each. I checked the students' work the first week, and then every other week, for completion, genuine effort, depth of thought, analysis of their reading strategies etc. and gave them ongoing feedback to help them improve their writing and gain more from the experience.

The students seemed particularly engaged by the online nature of the assignment, by the chance to exchange ideas with a peer and by the relatively open-ended format of the writing they had to produce (although I gave the guidelines, they had a choice of what aspects of the reading to discuss). Most of the students took the assignment seriously, but some saw the email format as a way of using an overly informal style (abbreviations, slang and emoticons). The next time we do a similar assignment, I will need to rethink how formal or casual I expect the students' writing to be.

Before the end of the year, I'd like to set up an asynchronous chat in my class (similar to ours, with the students divided into groups of 4 or 5). I'll keep you posted. Nelson mentioned MOO's in class, so I intend to check those out, too. In the future, I would like to explore the idea of a class blog (but would it be academic? personal? both?).