The Polliwog Journal

I’ve been writing, speaking, and thinking about CyberEnglish a lot lately, but today, as I was reading students’ cyberjournals, I was reminded of the simple things that make CyberEnglish so important. In her journal, Lilly wrote

Putting your assignments online really forces you to look at your writing and make changes. In most classes I just throw out old assignments, but in CyberEnglish I go back and revise my work.

Honestly, I did not tell her to write that, but I couldn’t have said it better myself.

And this week, our director of student services was in my classroom for a visit. She’s a big fan of CE for special ed students. Something she said reminded me that because we publish student work on the Web,

student models exist (after the first year). Current students can’t complain that they “don’t get it,” or that “it’s too hard.”

There is so much more:

• CE increases students’ fluency in writing. A keyboard may be a far superior tool for transforming thoughts into sentences. Fluency leads to confidence and the two combined eventually make better writers.
• In CE, students often perceive that they’re not writing; they’re only typing. And typing is more fun than writing. But CE students write a lot (varied audience, varied genre, varied purpose). I don’t know everything about teaching writing, but I do know that to get better at writing, one has to write. So we write.
• Writing on the web stays alive and important, creating that internal need to revise as Lilly wrote about.
• Because students’ writing is published, it is so much easier for them to review each others’ work.
• Last (for now) but not least, when students put writing on the web and choose fonts, colors, pictures to complement, links to make, etc., they are owning their work in ways that never could happen on paper. They are making writer and designer decisions because their audience will see what they have done. They want to feel proud of their work.

These days, I do want to push past web pages into blogs, wikis, and so much more. And even though the road toward my desired outcome is blocked right now, I think I might be content with knowing we’re still pretty far ahead of what most schools are doing with technology integration. What we’re doing, and have been doing, is still pretty darn amazing.