Writing with Technology: Top 5 Possible Assignments

Across the research that I've done, I have found a variety of assignments that both accomplish common core standards and explore alternative formats for writing through the use of technology.

Here are some specific examples of how to use technology as more than just a glorified typewriter:

Living Newspaper

"Introduction of visual images into print texts might also allow us to resurrect seldom used genres. One such genre, Living Newspapers, popular during the Depression Era dramatized newspaper accounts of human interest stories with social and political implications, punctuated by statistics related to the issue illustrated in the narrative and music used as satire. Although originally created as plays emulating today's "docudramas," the genre would work well in a Web-based environment in which students could locate the newspaper article, write the script, research the statistics, create charts and graphs to illustrate those, and sample music for song lyrics that would add an ironic twist" (Swensen 364).

Commonplace Book

"The first commonplace books appeared during the Renaissance and contained hand-copied excerpts from manuscripts- and, eventually, from printed books- along with personal annotations. As Garvey describes, these were succeeded by something closer to what we think of as scrapbooks. In them, people of a literary bent would paste photographs or cuttings from magazines and newspapers. Between the keepsakes, they would scribble appropriate scraps of prose or poetry, or associated thoughts that might profit from later revision" (Swensen 364).

This translates into blogging: "The medium's technological properties- pasting, linking, tagging, and so on- have very quickly encouraged a common style of publishing that very few bloggers resist. Anderson [editor of Wired magazine] is surely right to suggest that blogs are as various as humanity- because posts can be intel- ligent or silly, rigorously reported or carefree, essayistic or written in a kind of telegraphese- but blogs do seem to have a secondary, critical rela- tionship to primary forms of media and to other blogs" (Swensen 364).

"Deformed" Poetry

"[Robinson] has students do what he calls 'deform' the poem, rewriting it into a new work" (Webb 85).

"The ease and potential for textual intervention is greatly increased by the availability of digitized texts. This ability to take the words of any work of literature and put them into a word processor creates powerful close-reading possibilities that go beyond scribbling in the margins. The language of literature becomes something that the students manipulate for meaning, and they thus come to see literature as actively created, interpreted, and reinterpreted" (Webb 85).

Translation Experiment

"I asked students to choose a passage of The Odyssey that they found interesting either for the images or events described and study several different English translations of these lines. (). Then, by looking closely at different translations, they were to 'interpolate' word-by-word meaning and create a 'translated' version of the lines. They could choose to make their version as contemporary as they liked and to use poetry or prose" (Webb 86).

Discussion Boards

(little bit about my own experience with online discussion)

Wolsey: "Online threaded discussion allows the teacher and students to expand the classroom beyond the school day and beyond the school walls so that more thoughtful exchanges can take place" (English 56). 

"For each [work}, [she] formulated a set of writing prompts and asked students to respond to one prompt and to at least one other student's response to the literature. . . . These [questions] we might address in the classroom, but how many students will be able to answer these questions in a large-group discussion?" (English 57).