Technology In Writing: Midpoint Reflection

During my time in my course on Learning Theories & Instructional Design, I have been designing a proposal to use technology to support differentiation within the writing process. I have been supported by a Learning Support Coach (LSC) at my school as my mentor, and I have proposed finding, creating, and storing a series of video supports that instruct upon different aspects of the writing process. The purpose of this video catalog would be to serve as either re-teaching support, scaffolding or enrichment support for students within the writing process. Typical design for writing instruction on process pieces in my district is based on Lucy Calkins, and involves mini-lessons, and then workshop time, where conferencing and pointing out things to ‘notice’ from other students’ writing is the main source of support. However, as behavior disruptions have risen and student academic stamina has fallen coming out of the pandemic, I have noticed more and more time is spent having to re-teach strategies, and have felt like our writing pieces become very formulaic, and that students who need extra support don’t always get it, and that students who might be ready for more of a challenge don’t have it presented because so much more time is allotted to just getting the basic lessons/strategies across. The video resources could help mitigate these issues, and free more of teachers’ time up to conferencing, and providing support in areas of greatest need.

Goal-Never see a student look like this during the writing process
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The process overall has been a fruitful one, primarily because it has led to great conversations between myself the LSC who has been supporting me about what exactly should be our focus and purpose in writing instruction, and how technology can be used to make our time as teachers the most useful that it can be. I think having these conversations with colleagues is always a great starting point in seeking to implement any new program, strategy, etc., especially someone whose expertise is slightly different than your own. It has been very positive to listen to my LSC talk about making sure that our focus is purposeful, so that our use of technology is supporting our learning targets and identified student needs-in other words, we are not just adding technology so that we can say we added technology. I feel that is always something that needs to be considered when incorporating technology to teaching, or really when it comes to any decision made regarding education.

A challenge we have faced is finding videos that are short enough for students to realistically be expected to watch, yet advanced enough to reach middle-school students (especially those meant as enrichment resources). This challenge could be addressed by actually creating the videos ourselves using Slides or Canva and Screencastify, but then that would obviously mean more work and time for us in creating the materials. The other potential challenge would just be trusting that students would be able to use the video resources with integrity, and not just ‘watch’ them, without actually watching them.

I am hopeful that this endeavor will be beneficial-I feel that one major discussion that has been happening across my team, PLC, school, etc., is how we can most effectively address the gaps that we are seeing coming out of the pandemic, making the most use of our time to meet the greatest needs of our students. I think that steps like this, where technology is being used to provide small pieces of instruction or support to multiple students, allowing us as teachers to supplement our teaching, or the information in the videos, to differentiate student experiences, while still helping everyone working towards the same goals. I could even imagine this leading to “flipped mini lessons”, where students are assigned differentiated videos to watch outside of class, and then are supported through their own writing process in class. If this type of strategy goes well, I feel it could really be beneficial to our language arts curriculum in general, because writing is one area where both differentiation and technology can intersect. I also feel that I would be interested in continuing to seek out new ways to infuse technology within my school’s LA instruction-that is something else that I feel often comes up during department meetings, teachers looking for new strategies, as well as teachers expressing a wish to make their instruction more relevant to 21st-century learners. Having familiarity with those types of things would allow me to help share ideas with colleagues, benefiting even more students in the process!