Pew Report on Teens' Writing

[Demetri Orlando]

Thanks go to Tim Fish for passing along a link to this interesting ananlysis of teens' and parents' opinions of how technology relates to their writing: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Writing_Report_FINAL3.pdf

Some interesting findings: teens don't particularly think that technology improves the quality of their ideas. Parents hold a higher opinion of the use of technology.

I think most agree that it's easier to compose & revise using a computer. I also wonder whether the opinions would be different if teens had less access to computers... wonder if parents have a higher opinion of computers because they've had more experinece with not having had access to computers for writing.

[Mark Crotty]

As with most things, it depends on how one harnesses the potential of the tool. I've seen some kids for whom the computer has made their writing worse because they just spill everything onto the document, cut-and-paste supporting material randomly, et cetera. I've also seen kids use not just the ease of revision to their advantage, but also other tricks I've shown them; and they've improved their writing style significantly.

It's not really about the technology...it's about the habits of mind. How do we get kids to avail themselves of all the possibilities in meaningful, purposeful ways? We see that over and over again.

[Sarah Hanawald]

This report got released just in time for me to use it in a research project about kids, teachers, technology, writing, and spelling. Yep-grad school. I used a combination of interviews and surveys to examine how middle school teachers and students view spelling and technology's impact on students' spelling and writing skills. It was nice to be able to draw some comparisons using the PEW report along with my findings. I'm not so interested in spelling itself, but in spelling as what it traditionally represents--visible evidence of literacy. How is that different today than it was 10, 20, 50 years ago? Does the existence of technology based tools mean that spelling is an obsolete skill? What about the process of word study and learning to make spelling generalizations?

One of the best quotes I got was from a special education teacher who said that it is more effective (and faster) to teach her students to make their best guess, then right click, than it is to spend valuable classroom time looking words up in a dictionary. She feels her students need to be exposed to enough word study and spelling instruction that they are equipped to use tools such as spell check effectively and from there any word study should be focused on vocabulary development rather than spelling.