Education Week - June 14, 2017 - 22

English Language Arts
Google is opening the doors
for interactive writing lessons
COLLABORATIVE TOOLS, AND GOOGLE DOCS IN PARTICULAR, HAVE
shifted the way students write, collaborate, and get feedback and editing from teachers. It's the first thing nearly
all teachers interviewed for this story mentioned when
asked about the use of educational technology in literature
and writing instruction.
"Google Docs and the whole G Suite system for English
classrooms is revolutionizing the way we interact with
each other and create," said Bill Bass, the innovation coordinator for instructional technology, information, and library media for the Parkway school district in Chesterfield,
Mo., and a former English teacher. "That collaboration is
key to helping kids make authentic connections with text
and information."
Allowing teachers to provide electronic feedback within
text-instead of "red-lining" papers-paves the way for

FROM EDUC ATION W EEK PR E SS

Author Gary Marx
explores the

21 TRENDS
impacting
education
and our
future.
edweek.org/go/21Trends

Education Week / June 14, 2017

more transparent revisions and more targeted comments,
said Kristen Hawley Turner, the director of teacher education at Drew University in New Jersey and the co-author
of several books about ed tech and reading, including
Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Readers in a Digital
World.
Turner added that the ability for students to work with
each other is just as important.
Group work extends to social-annotation tools, too,
said Troy Hicks, a professor of English and education
at Central Michigan University and the co-author of
Connected Reading. Digital resources like NowComment
allow teachers to upload texts and have students highlight,
add questions, and create discussion threads with other
students.
In a related vein, peer-review tools are also playing an
important role. Sites like Eli Review and Writable-Hicks
has consulted for both-support the peer-review process,
provide step-by-step supports, and encourage effective
feedback strategies, Hicks said.

TECHNOLOGY HAS ALSO ENABLED PERSONALIZATION IN ENGLISH/LANguage arts. Students have new ways of communicating
knowledge, through presentations that might incorporate
text, infographics, photos, and video.
Students now have "multiple mediums and modes of creation and consumption that have changed the landscape,"
Bass said. Creating movie trailers as book reviews is one
example.
However, many English teachers still have concerns that
overuse of multimedia can have the effect of dumbing
down students' writing.
The use of personalized digital products is also expanding.
Commercial products, like Renaissance Accelerated Reader
360 and LightSail, make it easy for teachers to deliver the
same texts but at different reading levels or to customize reading and writing assignments based on those levels. Web-based Newsela, for example, offers daily news
articles adapted to reading levels in English and Spanish.
Adaptive products like READ 180, which assesses students
then provides customized exercises and lessons, are also
gaining in popularity.
But teachers need to ensure that adaptive and customized resources push students to read "outside their comfort zones," Hicks said. "We still want to introduce students to challenging texts."
One of the biggest struggles for teachers these days is
the unreliability of digital tools and infrastructure, Turner
said. "Technology fails. If your entire lesson is about students peer-reviewing and writing in Google Docs and the
Wi-Fi goes down, you're up a creek."
Bass said he sees a future that allows students many
more options for reading, writing, and collaborating, and
a structure that permits them to choose how to approach
the subject. That may mean augmented-reality and videoreality tools with 360 video for telling stories and the ability to communicate and collaborate in "multiple modes."
There's likely to be more reliance on digital content-from
e-books to streaming video. "We're going to ask kids to interact with the content in many different venues," he said.
-MICHELLE R. DAVIS

http://www.edweek.org/go/21Trends

Education Week - June 14, 2017

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