It’s funny to read these articles after a round of perusing cries of “texting is ruining our students’ writing!” and “reliance on technology is melting their brains!” (Which is an overdramatization….but not by that much).

We hear a lot about how our students are digital natives, yet out of the three, Moran and Holt’s articles particularly resonate with me because every year I’m in a classroom I’ve seen the exact opposite. It’s not the advanced computing students are struggling with (like tackling InDesign, or learning how to program). It’s simple things, like knowing you can use the TAB key to indent a consistent amount of spaces, or that commands like ctrl + z is a shortcut for undoing mistakes. Having access to computers isn’t enough…without direct instruction and activities that take advantage of our unique options, students are no better off than if they compose on paper. If anything, they’re worse. And that’s not even touching on the difficulties for students who didn’t have life-long access.

It goes along with what we talked about last week…technology doesn’t ruin our thought processes, but it does change the way we process information. And, if we take advantage of features in the programs we use, we can help our students adopt new ways of thinking that will improve their writing, simply by drawing their attention to new options.

I’m sure there are a bunch of examples that I could list, and others could come up with even more, but going off of Holt’s (and Sommer’s) observation that students are more likely to delete and replace than revise, it can be useful to have students compose in something like Google Docs. Like so many, I know I’m terrible about keeping multiple documents for my various revisions. I, too, just delete and replace. It feels cleaner and, for someone with my attention span, it means I don’t have to try and figure out which copy was actually my “better” one. But platforms like Google Docs or online Wiki pages give writers easy access to the document’s history, allowing them to switch between versions and see changes without risk of losing what they’ve done. Without complicating students’ organization and file folders, there’s a way to get them to reflect on their changes in a concrete way; it just needs to be pointed out and (as Moran suggests) built into structured activities until it becomes common place.

I’ve also found that I personally do better with organizing my research if I use a blog rather than notecards, and I’ve started showing this to my students as well. Most of them already think in terms of tags and keywords thanks to hashtags and word clouds. Since blog entries allow multiple tags and instantaneous sorting, I find it easier to organize myself and to reference as I write. It’s not all that different from the pen and paper approach I was taught, but the tech itself allows me to work faster and make more complex connections because other sites have already made tagging and searching second nature.