Three technology-enhanced tasks for classroom L2 writing

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What do you think?

1.How can we integrate technology in classroom L2 writing assessment and feedback?

2.What types of technology can be used?

In the digital age, the notion of literacy has been expanded to include multimedia literacies. With the help of technology, students can employ digital media to produce their writing.

Three technology-enhanced tasks for classroom writing assessment

1. DIGITAL STORYTELLING

A digital story is usually provided by a first person and the focus is on the process of making it rather than on the product or the film itself.

• Digital storytelling allows students to work individually or in small groups to produce a digital project that combines writing, digital images, and digital video.

• A digital story is a personal narrative (about a personal experience or personal reflection on a topic) presented orally in the first person and combined with multimedia like photos, music, and other sounds.

For L2 school learners, a range of other genres can be used for digital storytelling.

• For example, students can create a digital recount of an important event, such as the 50th anniversary of their school, a memorable overseas trip, or a meaningful volunteering experience.

• Alternatively, students can produce a creative story using the digital format, combining the story with multimedia – e.g., the twenty-first century Cinderella.

• Students can also produce a critique of a social issue (e.g., teen pregnancy, cyberbullying, and domestic violence) and express their personal thoughts on the topic in a digital story.

Two examples

1. A recount (Trip to Tung Chung) by a Grade 2 student in Hong Kong

2. A creative story (Little lion learning mathematics) by a Grade 3 student in Hong Kong (illustrations by the student himself)

Assessment of Digital Storytelling

Peer/self-assessment can be incorporated at different stages of the digital storytelling process.

1. At the scriptwriting stage, students can review each other’s storyboards and help their peers improve the writing;

2. they can also offer suggestions about the images or pictures chosen.

3. Before narrating the stories, they can do rehearsals of the narration in pairs or small groups and help one another improve the input before they start recording the narration for their digital stories.

Students can also engage in self-assessment.

1. For example, students can narrate the script one sentence at a time or narrate the whole story in one go,

2. and they can listen to the recording any time they like.

3. If they are not happy with the quality of the narration, they can always redo it.

4. Self-assessment takes place, sometimes without being students themselves being conscious of it.

5. To facilitate self-assessment, teachers should let students have the success criteria/learning goals in advance so that they can assess their own performance based on the same criteria/goals.

Benefit of Digital Storytelling

1. Technology use in classroom writing is likely to motivate and engage students.

2. When students create digital stories, they practice integrated language skills: they read and write the script, paying attention to the use of grammar and vocabulary, and they speak and listen as they work on the narration (Brenner 2014).

3. As students set out to research for relevant data for their digital stories, gather information and images, photos, music, etc. to complete the task, they not only develop their writing skills but also enhance their information and digital literacy (Cheung and Lee 2013).

One of the best things about digital stories is that they are relatively easy to produce.

Students only need to download a free, user-friendly software such as Photo Story 3 or Movie Maker.

Step One: The Topic

• Brainstorming potential topics in class to get students thinking about different ideas would help to get the process started.

• It might be the case that the teacher wants students to focus in certain areas, such as a specific unit in science or history.

• The story also needs to have a beginning, middle, and an end, with an “emotional center.

• The students would have to think through the parts of their movie,

• discuss it,

• write out an outline, and so forth provides much room to build the language Journal domains of

• reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in a more motivating way than writing a research report and sharing it with the class.

Step Two: The Storyboard

• Once an idea or topic has been selected, creating a storyboard or using this type of graphic organizer to roughly sketch and outline the parts of the movie helps organize the sequence of the movie.

• A basic storyboard provides a place to draw a picture and a place to explain what should take place in the scene.

• For example, who will be in the scene, what questions will be asked, the placement of the people and props in the room, and any effects needed, such as special lighting.

• The following website provides various templates to choose from

Step Three: Filming

• Once the storyboard is complete it is time to set some dates to start filming.

• The kind of camera used can vary, from an iPad video camera, to a phone video camera, to a flip video camera, to a professional camera, and so on.

Step Four: Editing

• Using Windows Movie Maker or iMovie for a Mac are free options that allow the student to insert a title page, write in captions, add in music, record their voice into it as narrator, provide neat transitions between clips, and have credits at the end.

• The files can be saved onto the computer, emailed, uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, and/ or burned onto a disc to be played on a television.

• There are also free apps to use on a phone to edit, such as Cute CUT, Vyclone, and Montaj.

2. BLOG-BASED WRITING

Blogs (weblogs) are websites that can be easily created and updated without any specialized knowledge of HTML programming.

Typically a blog comprises entries which are presented in reverse chronological order on a single page.

Blogs are a user-friendly tool.

With just a click of the comment function button, students can post comments and communicate with the blogger, whereby authentic communication is facilitated.

In L2 school contexts, blog-based writing is a useful formative writing assessment tool that teachers can use to give feedback to students, to encourage peer feedback, and to guide their own instruction.

• Teachers can create a class blog and encourage students to upload entries and post comments on a regular basis.

• Through students’ ongoing blog-based writing, teachers can help students develop fluency and build confidence in writing;

• they can also offer feedback to students and help them understand their strengths and major weaknesses in writing, on which further instruction can be based.

Specifically, the class blog can serve as a platform to promote a sense of community among members of the class and to provide a collaborative space for discussion, exchange of ideas, peer evaluation, and self-reflection (Campbell 2003);

• it can also promote problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills (Murray and Hourigan 2008).

Aside from a class blog, students can keep an individual learner blog, which is an online journal that students can update on an ongoing basis (Campbell 2003).

• Such blog-based writing can foster students’ fluency in writing and develop their creative voice (Murray and Hourigan 2008).

• Students can read their peers’ blogs, post comments, and interact with one another on a regular basis.

Benefit of Blog-Based Writing

1. Blogs can develop a reflective learning culture through meaning making and social interaction (Oravec 2002, 2003).

2. They can be used for establishing goals and common vision within a group and are particularly useful for promoting a collaborative culture and a sense of community (Miceli et al. 2010; Slavin 1989).

3. Through blogging, students can actively engage in conversations with their classmates and connect to contexts beyond the classroom (Du and Wagner 2007).

4. Blogging can also enhance learners’ writing performance and promote learner autonomy (Bhattacharya and Chauhan 2010; Sun 2010);

5. it can provide students with a larger audience for their writing, “erase the limitation of classroom walls” (Chen et al. 2011, p. E1),

6. and is found to support student’s emergent literacy development (Gebhard and Harman 2011).

Examples of class blogs

1. A Grade 5 class blog documenting students’ writing on “Eating out” and “Fables”

2. A Grade 5–6 class blog that showcases students’ “wonderful writing”

3. A Grade 9 class blog that includes entries by both teacher and students

3, COLLABORATIVE WRITING WITH WIKI

While blogs put an emphasis on authorial voice and text ownership, wikis provide a platform for collaborative writing where students can alter the posted material by modifying content on the wiki page or adding new wiki pages. The best known example is Wikipedia, which is a jointly produced wiki and an online encyclopedia.

Common wiki sites include:

1. PBWiki

2. Wikispaces

• Wikis are a user-friendly tool that allows asynchronous communication.

• Students can work collaboratively in small groups to create wiki projects.

• Editing on wikis can be performed easily and restricted to members with a password.

• The history log of a wiki enables users to keep track of the history of members’ contributions and edits,

• while the discussion space allows users to post comments and engage in discussion.

Through working collaboratively with wikis in Hong Kong secondary classrooms, students found the writing experience more authentic and engaging, compared with traditional writing, and they were able to produce longer and more coherent texts collaboratively on wikis (Mak and Coniam 2008).

Also conducted in Hong Kong, the study by Woo et al. (2011) showed that even Grade 5 primary learners could be receptive to the use of wikis.

Students were found to enjoy using wikis and believed that the tool could help them write better and work collaboratively with their peers.

• Like blog-based writing, wiki writing can serve as a useful tool for formative writing assessment of writing, lending itself readily to peer evaluation in particular.

• Based on students’ collaborative wiki writing and peer evaluation, teachers can provide formative feedback and fine tune their writing instruction according to student needs.

Benefit of Collaborative Writing on Wikis

1. Students found the writing experience more authentic and engaging.

2. Students can produce longer and more coherent texts collaboratively.

3. Students enjoyed using wikis.

4. Students believed that wikis could help them write better and work collaboratively with their peers.

Two examples

1. Wiki writing among Grade 7 students in a secondary school in Hong Kong: “Using wikis to enhance and develop writing skills among secondary school students in Hong Kong”

2. US-based High School Online Collaborative Writing project

Flipped classroom + wiki-based collaborative writing

RESULTS:

1. The results showed that learning with Wikipedia in the flipped classroom was more effective than learning with Wikipedia in the conventional classroom.

2. The participants in the flipped group created more versions of Wikipedia entries.

3. The flipped learning environment provided the students with more in-class collaboration and interaction opportunities, leading to more time and space for active learning.