TeacherTech

Teachers teach writing in many different ways, depending on students' backgrounds, their first languages, their language learning goals, curricular goals, and many other factors. Many teachers use some variation on the brainstorm/ draft/ peer edit/ revise/ teacher edit/ revise scheme; information about teaching writing is available not only in many great textbooks, but all over the Web.

More important than the exact strategy, perhaps, is finding engaging opportunities so that students actually want to write. Technology can provide opportunities for writing tasks to meet all five of the engagement guidelines proposed in Module 1.

The following strategies, provided by Brown University, provide teaching principles for helping writing teachers meet the engagement guidelines.

• Teachers demonstrate how writing and reading are connected.

• Teachers demonstrate how writing and reading are tools for thinking and learning.

• Teachers explicitly demonstrate how brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing are recursive processes.

• Teachers model exemplary writing practices for their students and demonstrate how writers write about topics that are meaningful to them.

• Teachers teach grammar in the context of actual writing.

• Teachers provide varied and increasingly challenging writing experiences for students at all grade levels.

• Teachers develop a list of core words for their students to use in their writing.

• Teachers regularly integrate spelling into writing and reading instruction.

Find more about these strategies on the Brown University Web site.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of useful technologies to support student writing. Because teachers cannot learn them all, it is important for them to choose tools that have a wide range of uses as the four linked below do.