WEB-WRITING 2.0:
ENABLING, DOCUMENTING, AND ASSESSING WRITING ONLINE
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The use of internet has made some changes in writing. Nowadays there are more tools that encourage people to write, such as blogs, chats or social networks. So, teachers have to be able to use this new technologies in order to motivate and develop students writing skills. Another thing that teachers have to deal with is that they have to link the informal way of writing that this technologies use to the development of more formal or academic writing.
There are many technologies that encourage and facilitate writing and composition by offering assessment in writing and editing. Another use of this technology is electronic portfolios to gather students works.
Writing Online
There are many online editors, most of them offer only basic functions and not the full features of a Microsoft office word processor. Most online editors often save documents auntomatically in the computer in order not to lose the information, and many of them are specifically created for posting blogs or other pages.
Google has a tool called Google Docs for online text editing, it offers a maximum of 5,000 documents or presentations for online storage and supports 48 languages.
What is good about Google is that it can save the changes made off-line, it gives you the option to save the changes to the the google database and the local computer, so using Google Docs you can have access to your documents anywhere and also share them.
Another thing are electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) for collecting works, sharing things and adding multimedia files, and you can also control the acces to it. You can use wikis, blogs or Google Docs and it is a way to give students more responsability in their writings and assessments.
There are some tools to give feedback in grammar and spelling, there are some text processors available in many languages, such as AbieWord (a multilingual word processor), some of them called Automated Essay Scoring (AES) also provide assessment and scores, on the other hand, Grammar checkers are usually designed for native speakers, but there are some programs designed for language learners such as BonPatro, a french program in which users enter a text and they receive the text with suggestions in different colors indicating the type of error, it gives some explanations but not the correction, so it requires from the student a reflection on the problem and the correct answer.
Reflection
Engaging students in writing is not an easy task, especially if we are talking about writing in an L2, because students often find it hard expressing themselves in another language, they get complicated with meanings and sentence formation, apart from that, we have to take into account that the society we are living in is moving fast and every day more people have access to technology, so we have to take advantage of this when we have the opportunity.
Web-Writing is a very good way to approach writing, because as the text says, it gives you the opportunity to copy and paste and move whole sentences from one place to another, so you can edit and store it online and you can also have access to it everywhere there is internet and a computer available.
Web writing is especailly good in an L2 because you can get more immediate feedback on spelling, grammar or synonyms and it can also be funnier because you can choose different types and colors of letters and you can add pictures as well.
On the other hand, I think that the idea of e-portfolios is very interesting because it gives students the opportnity to save and storage their works, they can also be more creative and it is a way to see their own progress on writing.
I must say that i had never used blogs, but i think that is a very interesting tool that can be used to encourage students to write, because you can personalize your page, add some gadgets, give it your personal touch and make it funny.
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