Chapter 3: Conferring through Blogs, Wikis, and Collaborative Word Processors

Chapter Summary:

     Conferring with students is an important part of the writing process.  Writers grow when there is response to their work, and they respond to others (p. 36).  The time it takes to physically have a one on one conference is limited, but having a source to write as needed and have peer responses that could go beyond the typical “that’s good” response would be greatly helpful.  That is where the blogs, wikis and collaborative word processors come into play.  Digital conferencing can help teachers by allowing them time to pause and reflect on each students’ needs, it can allow students to save their documents automatically and finally the learning doesn’t have to stop at the end of the class period.  There are three technical tools that can be used; wikis, blogs and collaborative word processors.  Wikis are easy to create one’s own page, the pages history is archived automatically and multimedia can be embedded.  Blogs are singly authored, easily tagged and categorized by topic, archived automatically and multimedia can be embedded.  Collaborative word processors can create files in the online word processor or up loaded from a hard drive and it has word processor functions but can be worked on with others at the same time.

Making Connections:   

     I think conferring with students is the best way for them to learn to be better writers, although the lack of time available during the day makes it hard for teachers to have a one on one conference with each and every student they have in the classroom.  I believe this is why using a blog, wiki or collaborative word processor to work on projects and papers would be helpful in the teaching process.  Each of the choices would be helpful in different ways in the classroom, but the most effective way is having the time to connect with each student about their project or paper.  Using one of these would give me the opportunity to respond to students when I had extra time at home and not just during the school day.  I would be able to give each of my student the help they needed.

Classroom Implications:               

     I think having each student use a blog for the writing process would be a great idea.  A student could start their writing process on their blog they could get feedback from the teacher after each draft.  The student’s peers could also respond to their peers writings and give them feedback.  This also gives students the ability to save their work as they are making corrections to their paper. Another great tool for collaboration is Google Drive. Students can share their work with whoever they need to, comment on each other’s work and work simultaneously on a document. Using Google Drive is also helpful for teachers because it tracks the changes made to the document so teachers can evaluate people’s work and hold collaborators accountable.