Memo #5

As I am finishing up my research for my I-Search, I feel pretty good about where I am now with my questions about digital writing. I have talked to 3 teachers about topics such as digital writing in full, the concept of publishing, disconnect between in-service teachers and pre-service teachers, and about social media usage. I have found about 10 different articles that I have been reading and re-reading to get a better understanding of the studies that they describe. Now, I begin to work on forming some thoughts together and figuring out it all means for the bigger picture, how does digital writing help student’s overall writing. 

What surprised me was the abundance of articles and studies done that look at implementing digital writing, not only in high school classrooms, but in elementary classrooms. The thought had never occurred to me to start that young with having students use the technology that is widely available for them. Some of the studies that I looked at had elementary students posting to blogs and creative digital stories for projects. I want to mention in my paper somewhere about how teachers are starting with the younger students in having them use digital methods for writing purposes because I had never heard of it before.

I wouldn’t say that it frustrates me, but it worries me to have such a daunting task of writing an 8-10 page paper. I think I’m worried because usually I just have to start papers without having months of work and research to put into them. These worries will probably go away as soon as I put my memos together to find my common threads of information.

Some conclusions that I can draw with only one week left in my search is that I feel glad. I worked so hard with finding and completing interviews, researching, changing my focus, and researching again. It is like a sense of accomplishment where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but not fully reach it yet. There are still questions to be asked about digital writing and I know that my research probably won’t cover all of the questions that are out there. Plus, technology changes so fast that I personally can’t keep up. But I feel good about what I have found and where my thinking has led me. I just need to put it all down in words now!

Memo #4

After a lot of thought into this project, I think I am going to change the topic, but only slightly. My main focus from now on the concept of digital writing with a sub-topic of should social media be included. What is digital writing in the academia language? What else can constitute as digital writing besides just typing an essay? Where does the topic of online publishing come into play? How are teachers today viewing digital writing? Where is the disconnect between veteran teachers and first-year or pre-service teachers on the use of digital writing? To bring in the social media sub-topic would be to discuss if it can even be considered digital writing in the sense of the academic world? Does it have a place in the classrooms where it benefits student writing? I plan to look more into these new questions as the week goes on. Hopefully this will help the troubles I was having when looking for articles when I kept the two topics together.

               So far in my journey through the I-Search process, I have interviewed three teachers, all from the same high school, about their use of digital writing and how it is affecting their students writing. What I have noticed now after conducting the interviews is that my questioning, outside of the questions I had prepared, seemed to put the social media topic into question before I thought about making it a sub-topic. The general consensus throughout the interviews was that digital writing is not going away any time soon, and the teachers need to be savvy with the technologies out there. Two of the teachers were already using some form of digital writing or digital methods in their classrooms, while one was set in his ways about keeping everything “the old fashioned way”. This leads me to question if these teachers have compiled evidence with their own students showing improvement or not by implementing the use of digital writing versus not bringing it into the classroom. I was lucky to have caught them after a Professional Development Day where one of the big topics was new ways to bring computers and technology into the classroom so they had been thinking about the topic more in context of their classrooms rather than theoretical. I agree with what I was mostly hearing from the teachers. There needs to be a mix of digital writing methods and previous methods to allow the students all the opportunities to succeed. When asked about the use of social media as a tool for digital writing, the teachers were not as receptive to the idea as they were to using digital writing methods. Such reasons include lack of time to master the new social media type sites and also worrying about student access to phones or computers to allow them onto the sites. Clearly, those are logical concerns for in-service teachers. I would be interested to find a teacher is who is using social media and their reasoning behind its use and the implications of its use.

               I am going to continue talking to teachers about their use of digital writing in their classrooms. To take Professor Collin’s advice, I am looking into other schools as well to interview teachers that I have working relationships with to find out about their views on the implementation of digital writing. I am also starting to think about maybe talking to some high school students that I have met to see if they enjoy using technology or digital writing in their classrooms, why or why not. It would be interesting to ask students if they feel as though they are better writers by using digital methods instead of the normal pen and paper.

Memo #3 - Preparing for the Interviews

I am now preparing for the primary source part of the project where I have decided to interview a selection of teachers about my topic. My primary source interviews include English teachers that I have either had or known in high school. I will be interviewing teachers who all have different views on digital writing and social media in the classroom. I think that by hearing different viewpoints on a subject, you are allowed to come up with your own conclusions about the subject. In the case of this project, I am able to learn about and report the different viewpoints that a current teacher may have about the use of digital writing or social media for class use. I have already emailed five teachers in hopes to interview at least three of them for this project. In preparation for these interviews, I have created a running list of questions that I would like to discuss with them. These questions include:

• When you hear the term “digital writing” what first comes to mind in the terms of education?
• Were you ever educated on how to implement digital writing into your classroom? Personal Development or Conferences you may have attended?
•  Do you use a form of digital writing within your classroom?
• What do you see as the positives of using this digital writing form?
• Does using digital writing improve the students overall writing?
• Are there other forms that you would like to use in future lessons or classrooms?
• Do you see any downfalls from using digital writing?
• Is there room for improvement in digital writing?
• What are your views on social media use within the classroom? Should it even have a place within the classroom?
• Do you consider social media writing included under digital writing? Why or why not?
• Have you heard of any social media sites that could potentially be used within a classroom?
• What are the downfalls of using social media?
• Do you think that student’s writing could be benefited from using social media as a tool in the classroom?
•  There are sites out there, such as Edmodo and Classroom 2.0, which act like a social media site but are used for educational purposes only. What are your thoughts on sites that replicate social media for educational purposes?
•  Do you think that social media sites will be used in future classrooms?

On the topic of secondary sources. I am still looking into more articles that go into the implications of social media as digital writing in the modern day classrooms. I am looking at more Education Journals from the library where studies may have been published on my research topic. I would use these sources to build up my knowledge of how social media and digital writing is generally used in classrooms. I am hoping to gain a more specific look into an average  high school so that I can see learn about practical applications. My previous memo went into some of the secondary sources that I have found that relate to my research topic. Any more secondary sources that I find in between now and my interviews will be used as background information to present to the teachers about what studies today are saying about digital writing and social media.

More to come on this topic of interviews!

Memo #2 - What is the research telling me?

               I have been working on the research aspect of the I-Search for a while now. It has been a rough time going because I have been thinking mostly about the use of digital writing and social media go hand in hand within the classroom. I was trying to look for articles that would go in depth for both aspects, but that wasn’t turning up any leads. Many of the articles that I did find were related to utilizing social media and digital writing for pre-service teachers so that they could learn, and in turn, teach their students.

               The first article I read, titled “Set in Stone or Set in Motion? Multimodal and Digital Writing With Preservice English Teachers” by Melanie Hundley and Teri Holbrook, had to do with how preservice English teachers are viewing the use of digital writing within their teaching education. The article was written in 2013, so the information and digital writing connections are very similar to what can be found today. What I found interesting was that before the study was conducted many of the students that were interviewed had negative thoughts of implementing digital writing. One quote that the authors presented stated, “Real writing isn’t this instant messaging stuff or other kinds of digital writing. It’s the writing we do here in school. On paper. Essays and papers and theses. Not IMs and blogs and visual essays” (Hundley 500). The line is drawn for these students as to what constitutes real writing and the other stuff. The study conducted put these preservice students through a redesigned course load that was “positioning students first as composers of digital texts and then as teachers of digital text composition” through multiple digital writing assignments. After the study, the students recorded all the different things that they had learned through the assignments such as video essays. The students were forced to reevaluate what they thought was good writing and consider the vast technologies out there for their use in teaching. Studies show that “57% of teens who use the Internet do so to create online content. These ‘Content Creators’ make blogs and webpages; distribute self-authorized artwork, narratives, and videos online” (Hundley 501). Teenager’s use of digital writing and compositions are described within the studies conducted. I believe that the teachers need to be taught on how to tap into the student’s abilities within these digital forms.

               I was interested by how the Hundley article talked about the teachers before even going into high school students in digital technology. The teachers need to know how to use the new technologies before they can expect their students to learn through digital writing. This concept could also be applied to the social media aspect, even though the article does not go into it. It did mention a few statistics about social media and how the reform of its uses is need for the classroom. The articles states that “73% of online teens are using social networking sites. 93% of U.S. teens use the Internet. 63% go online daily. Such pervasive uses of digital technologies transform the educative needs of adolescents and subsequently of teachers.” Teachers today draw the line with the use of social media and how that is not considered to be useful in the academic world, but can it be reevaluated and examined to be considered useful? That is something I will have to research and interview more about in this project.

               Another article that I found, titled “Teaching with Social Media: Disrupting Present Day Public Education” by Susan Meabon Bartow, talks about how social media is in the classroom whether we want it there or not and how are teachers paying attention and benefiting from the use of social media. She examined five different classrooms and analyzed the teacher’s use of social media for classroom purposes. When commenting on the students use of social media, the author states, “Participants negotiate, interpret, evaluate, and analyze rapid and complex multimedia messages and regularly choose to compose and produce communication in increasingly self-directed and socially constructed ways” (Bartow 40). Why not tap into this communication and use it as a force for learning? The article provides a solid argument that social media can be used in and out of the classroom to help the students be constant learners. 

               By concluding the article, Bartow states that social media is “obliterating the time and space barriers of traditional classrooms, organizes differentiated learning and resources, facilitates communication, reaches more students and their families, stimulates sharing, and can’t keep itself from fostering production of knowledge in and far beyond the classroom” (Bartow 58). If teachers actually used social media to their advantage, this article says that it would create a whole new kind of classroom where students are actively learning in class, at home, and as members of a technological society. The article suggests that it blurs the lines of when learning is scheduled to be happening at school to a constant state of learning. By reading this article, it makes me wonder more about the connection that digital writing and social media share? Is there a commonality between the two so that the student is benefiting from its use? 

               Even though I have read more than just these two articles, I found that these are the two that really made me stop and think about this topic of digital writing and social media. I will continue with more research as I get ready to interview current teachers about their use of digital writing and social media within their classrooms. I hope to find where these two concepts align to help benefit the students positively.

Works Cited:

Hundley, Melanie, and Teri Holbrook. "Set In Stone Or Set In Motion?: Multimodal And Digital Writing With Preservice English Teachers." Journal Of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 56.6 (2013): 500-509. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Mar. 2014.

Meabon Bartow, Susan. "Teaching With Social Media: Disrupting Present Day Public Education." Educational Studies 50.1 (2014): 36-64. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Mar. 2014.

Memo #1

            I came to question the topic of digital writing and the use of social media within the classroom throughout my current education to become a teacher. Digital writing is a growing trend within the writing world today. With new advances in computer technology, young people are at the forefront of learning about and applying these new technologies in their everyday lives. It has always been a question of mine to figure out how teachers are using digital writing and social media within their classes. The students are so preoccupied with their social media websites and their phones that it makes me wonder if teachers are noticing and using these “distractions” to their advantage? My search goes into how teachers are implementing digital writing and the use of social media into the classroom and how it directly benefits students and improves their writing. What are the benefits from digital writing? What are the downfalls? Is there room for improvement? How is all of this seen within the classroom?

            My experiences with digital writing and social media would be equal to the normal teenagers, I would assume. Since I have only been out of high school for three years, I still have most of the same interests in social media that high schoolers are having today. I may not have all of the time on my hands that teenagers seem to have, but I still frequently visit sights. Because of my usage of social media sites, I started to think about how I can use them in the future when I begin teaching. Will I have to shut them down completely, or can I revamp them to become more educational and reach my students in another way. How can this affect their writing and their participation in the writing classroom? 

            This is an important question to me because I want to eventually teach in a high school, and this is what preoccupies teenager’s minds. There are rules set up in schools to keep students off of their cell phones because it causes distractions and takes away from the lesson that the teacher has prepared. But, what if the teacher can harness the student’s digital writing and social media usage for positive gains within the classroom? Is this possible, or will their only be opposition to the use of digital writing and social media in the classrooms today? I hope that my I-Search paper can lead me to a better conclusion on this topic.

The Start to the I-Search

Below is the link to my introductory video for my I-Search Project!
Enjoy!

Digital Writing and Social Media


Digital Writing and Social Media