Enhancing Literacy Instruction through Technology

Technology has altered how children experience language. As technology has taken root in society, literacy skills have expanded beyond simply reading and writing print texts to include interacting with digital texts and media. To prepare students to operate in this digital environment, teachers should integrate technology into language arts instruction; however, many teachers feel unprepared to do so effectively. Additionally, some teachers hesitate to implement technology into language arts instruction as a tool because of its supposed negative effects on literacy. Despite beliefs about technology inhibiting reading and writing, teachers can utilize technology to enhance literacy instruction. The digital age has laid the foundation for new literacies, and teachers must build upon it

Building on Our Strengths

Three additions to the law school\u27s faculty are bolstering three of the School\u27s already-strong areas---intellectual property, writing and technology. Learn about the new-comers\u27 accomplishments and their plans for the academic program

How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms

A survey of Advanced Placement and National Writing Project teachers shows that digital tools are widely used in their classrooms and professional lives. Yet, many of these high school and middle school teachers worry about digital divides when it comes to their students' access to technology and those who teach low-income students face obstacles in bringing technology into their teaching

The Message is the Medium: Electronically Helping Writing Tutors Help Electronically

The history of online writing centers is a history of doubt. I experienced those reservations in 2009, when, in addition to traditional face-to-face peer tutoring, I launched my own online peer tutoring program and began training undergraduates to respond to student submissions. Online writing centers were already common, but the decision the begin tutoring online was not all mine—the university administration was encouraging faculty to create online and web-assisted courses, and it expected its academic support keep up with the pace of technology, distance learning, and even fears that a future pandemic could hinder face to face learning. After consulting with tutors and instructional technology staff, I decided on asynchronous peer tutoring: students would fill out an intake form and questionnaire about their assignment and writing process, and then they would upload what they had written; tutors would then respond via email within 24 hours, even on weekends. This system allowed us to help as many students as quickly as possible, particularly non-traditional, commuting, and working students unable to meet face to face.University Writing Cente

Just Writing Center Work in the Digital Age: De Facto Multiliteracy Centers in Dialogue with Questions of Social Justice

Multiliteracy, new media writing, and multimodality: in some form or another, the kind of sleek, technological world these terms conjure emerges as a subject of conversation in current writing center work. When I began teaching a writing center theory course at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing, I scheduled about three-days worth of formal space for the stuff of multiliteracy. Among other essays, students read David Sheridan’s “Words, Images, Sounds: Writing Centers as Multiliteracy Centers,” a piece about how Sheridan helped start a “technology-rich” multiliteracy center staffed by tech- and multimodal-rhetoric-savvy consultants at the University of Michigan (“Words, Images, Sounds” 341). I was met with what I soon learned was a typical response to the essay: “So, where is it? Where’s the multiliteracy center?” “Gone,” was my answer, and in an official sense, it was: it dissipated after only a few years,1 and, what remains, among other Sweetland services, is the Peer Tutoring Center, an apparently far cry from the futuristic spaces that visions like Sheridan’s evoke. With computers too old and too few in number, our windowless, underground tutoring space looks like days of writing center past, not writing center future. And despite an understanding of our own institutional privilege, our collective affect resembles that of colleagues at less privileged institutions: many of us still feel like we are a long way off from the kind of cutting-edge multiliteracy center that Sheridan describes.University Writing Cente

Electrical futures past

Futurist writing about technology emerged in the late 19th century at the same time as new kinds of electrical technology were making utopian futures seem practically attainable. Electrical writers and novelists alike thus borrowed from the popular ‘science’ fiction of Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy and others to try to create self-fulfilling prophecies of a future in which electrical gadgets and machines met all major practical needs of civilization. To the extent that many parts of our world are populated by the hardware that they forecast, they succeeded in their goal

Exploring the Interactions Between Writing Pedagogy and Technological Knowledge in Online Writing Consultation

Online writing consultation continues to advance from mere asynchronous email systems to more technologically rich synchronous venues. Technologies, such as chat rooms and video conferencing software, to even more immersive and interactive virtual environments, have created complex and rewarding spaces for writing consultations to take place. However, most professional conversation, training, and research for online writing consultation focuses on two aspects of online writing consultation—technological knowledge, often fixated on learning to use a technology to teach, and pedagogical knowledge, knowledge about writing and tutoring practices, which are often based in traditional face-to-face tutoring processes. This study looks at how writing tutors come to understand the interactions between pedagogy and technology by considering their talk both in reflection of their development as writing tutors in addition to their online consultation sessions. Following a small staff of 7 writing tutors from their training onto their tutoring session and in their reflection of their practices, this study utilized both multimodal discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis to learn more about how they shaped their practices when working online. By analyzing tutors’ ways of talking about their practices, how writing consultants come to recognize and understand their pedagogical approaches through the lens of a tutoring technology, and how they interact with and utilize a technology meaningfully based on their pedagogical methods, assists in developing more comprehensive training for online writing consultants

Technology in Second Language Writing: Advances in Composing, Translation, Writing Pedagogy and Data-Driven Learning

This edited volume showcases state-of-the-art research in technological applications in second language writing. It examines multimodal composing, digital feedback, data-driven learning, machine translation, and technological applications in writing pedagogy. Technology in Second Language Writing reflects the rapidly changing field of technology in second language learning and highlights technological advances across different areas relevant to L2 writing. Composed of empirical studies, reviews, and descriptive essays, this book covers a variety of topics across the areas of composing, pedagogy, and writing research. It includes discussion of computer-mediated communication, language learners’ perceptions about using technology in their writing, the use of social media in writing, corpus learning, translation software, and the use of electronic feedback in language classrooms. Offering a multifaceted approach to technology in a wide variety of second language writing contexts, this cutting-edge book serves as essential reading for scholars and postgraduate students in the field of language teaching, applied linguistics, and TESOL

Computers, the internet, and cheating among secondary school students: Some implications for educators

This article investigates in greater depth one particular aspect of cheating within secondary education and some implications for measuring academic achievement. More specifically, it examines how secondary students exploit the Internet for plagiarizing schoolwork, and looks at how a traditional method of educational assessment, namely paper-based report and essay writing, has been impacted by the growth of Internet usage and the proliferation of computer skills among secondary school students. One of the conclusions is that students’ technology fluency is forcing educators to revisit conventional assessment methods. Different options for combating Internet plagiarism are presented, and some software tools as well as non-technology solutions are evaluated in light of the problems brought about by “cyberplagiarism.