STaRT Tech Learning Community

I have been involved in a number of student online writing projects this year. The Writing Room was our first attempt at creating a space online where students and teachers could post their writing for an authentic audience in the secure confines of AbbyNet. 15 teachers have signed on the project so far. Some classes used it for a single assignment, some have used it consistently over the year and are regular contributers. While overseeing this project I have had the opportunity to observe a number of things that I would like to share with the community.

1. Like any instructional strategy, taking students online to write needs to be modeled by the teacher as well as consistently supported if students are going to buy in. In many cases, teachers used the Writing Room to "try" online writing with their students. The trial did not extend past the first stage for various reasons. One of my goals for the next month is to survey teachers who used the Writing Room to find out what barriers they experienced in using the resource. For some teachers, the Writing Room was a good tool to connect home and school around writing. Students could log on at home and revise and edit their work as well as read and respond to their classmates work. These teachers were very focused on using the Writing Room and treated the exercise seriously. Not surprisingly, their students bought in to the strategy and produced, in many cases, very good work.

2. The second observation I made was that there needs to be training provided for teachers around responding effectively to writing. In the online world, responding to writing is a given. There are few articles on the web that do not have the ability for readers to provide feedback. Responding to someone's writing in thoughtful, honorable, coherent manner is a 21st century literacy. The Writing Room could be a great place to practice it. I will need to look for ways to provide training to teachers so that they can facilitate this.

3. Different spaces for different purposes. Soon after we had launched the Writing Room I realized that students could have benefited from a "smaller room" that would facilitate peer editing to work on their drafts rather than having to publish their work to the larger community in order for it to appear online. A classroom version of the Writing Room could have greatly benefited students. While this is very easy to accomplish within AbbyNet (FirstClass) by having the teacher create a conference on their AbbyNet desktop and then placing it on their students' AbbyNet desktops, training would be needed in order for teachers to feel comfortable doing it. I hope to have training available for this in the 07-08 school year.

4. A strategy for monitoring the writing room needs to be developed. On several occasions students chose to misuse the Writing Room by posting pictures of themselves and engaging in inappropriate discourse. In most cases the offenses were noticed early on and action was taken. However, I realize that there needs to be a more formal strategy in place for regular monitoring. To expand this concept further, I believe that the writing room would benefit by having resident writers interact with students, hopefully creating excitement and interest around writing and bringing a sense of community to the forum.

As we do our post surveys I plan on fleshing out these ideas and hopefully implement changes that will make the Writing Room a vibrant space for SD34 students to interact with other writers.