Week 9: Writing Throught the Technology

The articles required for this week, introduce new ways of using technology to teach second language writing skills: Blogs, Wikis and Collaborative Writing.

The first article: “Process Writing and the Internet: Blogs and Ning Networks”, shows how these technological tools can be useful to teach writing skills. A blog is a website with different entries that students can use to practice their writing skill. As personal experience using blogs for writing these entries every week for my Instructional Technology class, I have to say that the use of Blogs in the classroom is very useful to enhance writing skills. I have seen how I enhance my writing skills in a good way. After this class, it was difficult for me try to write a big writing task, even a short task could be a short challenge, but now I write fluently and I can organize my ideas in a clearly way. Also, the article mentioned the use of Ning which is a social networking site, similar to a blog, with the difference that this side has more technological resources, such as multimedia.

In the second article “Online Collaborative Writing Using Wikis”, the author claimed the use of wikis to enhance the writing and collaborative skills of the learners. In this article, I found an example of Collaborative Writing task. The teacher assigned a group of students to write in a wiki, which is an online platform where anyone can add or edit information that has been add for others. Something that really like from the article, was the fact that the teachers provides a clearly description of the task, the steps of the creative process, the prompts and the responses of the students to a challenging task.

In conclusion, I really enjoy reading these week’s articles that shows new techniques to enhance writing and collaborative skills, and I have to say that these articles encourage me to use one of these techniques with my future students.