Why Technology? Better Application to the 'Real World'

Writing online provides students with a real audience. 

Some of the basic aspects of writing include considering and investigating the audience and purpose of your work. English teachers have widely acknowledged the necessity of writing for a specific audience. Because who you are writing to affects the genuineness, competency, and tone of your writing, it is important for students to write to a targeted audience (other than the teacher who they may or may not care to impress).
Previously, theorists have encouraged educators to write for an audience besides the teacher, even if that audience was more fiction than fact. As an alternative to that fictional audience, students now have "very real, very diverse, and very distant audiences for their compositions, and their compositions have more opportunities to address needs that existed prior to and were not manufactured to drive the writing" (Swensen 361). This is possible through social media and other applicable forums.
Allen Webb experimented with some of these online resources with his college level English class. Because today's authors are often active online, there is a variety of online resources that have real people interacting with one another about literature and writing. Webb wrote that, "So many of the sites are alive, connected to living poets and to poetry lovers" (84) In his experience, "using these online resources for the teaching of poetry brought students into the world of professional poets, and lovers and scholars of poetry, so that the writing of a poem or writing about poetry seemed like participation in a community" (84). He then had them post their class assignments on individually created blog sites and found that "As students created links to their favorite poems and published these on their blog sites, they were creating anthologies, inviting other students in the class to read their favorite poems and comment" (Webb 84). Although Webb's experience is at the university level, everything he did can be applied to a secondary education English classroom with modifications as necessary.

The social environment is more conducive to full class participation.

Because writing online doesn't limit the number of responses (through time or social positioning), more students are able to participate in full class discussion. Kathy English questions just "how many students will be able to answer. . . questions in a large-group discussion?" (57). She suggests that "probably only those who are talkers - usually about 15% of the class" are actually able to fully participate in large-group discussions in the classroom. She goes on to say that, 'yes, we could break students into small groups to discuss these questions. Each group could take one question to answer thoroughly and give different opinions, or each group could take all questions and discuss them, but they probably wouldn't complete the discussion for each question" (English 57). At any rate, large group and small group discussions, while still an important part of a classroom environment, are often less than optimal. Online participation can both supplement these in-class discussions and enhance them by taking the students to a place where they can thoughtfully and fully respond. Not only can they think about what they want to say before they say it (rather than a 'spur-of-the-moment' response), but they can also share their ideas without being interrupted or talked over.

Incorporating technology into the English classroom promotes engagement with complex ideas.

I believe very strongly in humanity's ability to discover new knowledge. Most people have heard of the irony of the quote attributed to Charles H Duell, that "everything that can be invented has been invented." Duell was the Commissioner of the US patent office in 1899, and while they did already have electricity and the basic telephone, clearly many things have been invented since the industrial revolution.  I believe that this same irony is often found in educational settings: some educators believe that the teacher has all of the knowledge and it is their responsibility to instill that knowledge into their students. Rather, teaching and learning is a process of discovery for all participants (even though well trained teachers should lead and aid in that discovery). Because humanity has not yet discovered all of the things to be discovered, isn't education a part of preparing the up and coming humans to discover those things? My point in bringing all of this up is that if we want students to seek out "new ideas, new insights, and new visions of the truth," then traditional forms of gathering and communicating information might not be the best approach to achieving that objective (Swensen 362).