THEN: Journal - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Jul 09
  

  Tommi Griffin

  • Book review: Teaching the New Writing: Technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom
    
    Printable version
    

    
    

    Jenna McWilliams (Indiana University)

  • The pairing of K-12 teachers with higher ed faculty makes for an interesting and fruitful partnership, as evidenced by the NWP's new book, Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • The opening chapter, written by Herrington and Moran, identifies two key purposes for this book:
      
      

      [T]he chapters support grounded generalizations about how our understandings of writing are changing and how this broader conception of writing--and the skills it draws on--aligns, or does not align, with current standardized testing. Equally, if not more importantly, the collection provides guidance and support to teachers generally, giving them models of teachers who have, despite pressures to do otherwise, engaged the new writing in their classrooms, identifying learning objectives and assessment criteria for their e-writing projects.

      
      
      The book succeeds wildly at both goals, painting a picture of a slow but revolutionary change in what it means to write, and to teach writing, in a participatory culture.
    • In "Senior Boards: Multimedia Presentations from Yearlong Research and Community-Based Culminating Project," Bryan Ripley Crandall describes his effort to shift senior project requirements to prepare learners for "writing for the real world":
      
      

      [A]s an English teacher, I've had to adapt with new technology to keep up. I feel obligated to provide students the best technological resources I can because I recognize an online, digital life is what my students know and where they'll be in the future. Digital literacy is a growing expectation of higher education, employers, parents, and students.

      
      
      Here, Crandall points to two key sentiments that run through Teaching the New Writing: That writing teachers recognize the need to integrate new media technologies and practices into their classrooms, and that they feel a little desperate at finding strategies for keeping up with the technological and cultural changes that give rise to this need.
• 30 Jun 09
  

  Miguel guhlin
  • The usual kind of staff development--the one-shot training workshop mandated by the principal or superintendent--will not produce the desired effect, or perhaps any effect at all. Teachers will bring technology into their classroom practice gradually, over time, and at different rates, with long-term help from colleagues and from professional networks like BreadNet and the National Writing Project. And, most important of all, teachers need to be given time to investigate and use technology themselves, personally and professionally, so that they can themselves assess the ways that these tools can enhance a given curricular unit. Technology for its own sake is not what these educators want or need.
  • Trying to quantify and measure so-called "21st-century skills" now is like trying to anticipate the punchline of a joke that hasn't even been told yet. Even if you did get lucky and guess it on your first or second try, you've missed the whole point of the joke.
    
    Teaching the New Writing hammers hard on this point, returning in chapter after chapter to the issue of assessment and the tensions teachers feel between what can feel at times like oppositional forces. Herrington and Moran write that:
    
    

    [t]eachers are caught in this conflict, for their students' sake wanting to respond to the changes taking place in this thing we call writing, and at the same time wanting their students to do well in the 19th-century school essay called for on standardized tests.

• 23 Jun 09
  

  Terry Elliott

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