“I argue here and throughout this book that if we engage students in real writing tasks and we use technology in such a way that it complements their innate need to find purposes and audiences for their work, we can have them engaged in a digital writing process that focuses first on the writer, then on the writing, and lastly on the technology.”
– Troy Hicks
In Hick’s book, he discusses five principles of the digital writing workshop approach which include student choice, active revision, author’s craft, publication, and broad visions of assessment. He furthers his discussion by providing us with what he says are the three technologies students can use to manage themselves on the web. RSS, social bookmarking, and blogging are the three ways students can express and keep track of themselves while working on the Internet.
This book is and will continue to be extremely useful for educators everywhere. It shows readers multiple ways to incorporate technology into the classroom. Students today all know how to properly use the web and technology, so teachers might as well find great and effective ways to tie that into education. Hicks provides teachers with tremendous ideas on how to successfully use the technology that is all around us by teaching us new ways to infuse it into our curriculum. Blogs are one way students can express themselves freely and also a way for them to publish their work online. With this, students will be introduced to new styles of learning but already have background knowledge on how to begin since they are so used to the technology around them. I believe this book will be a useful tool for me in the future and I definitely plan on taking the new strategies that I have learned from it and using them with my students.
christie gomez 