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.