Writing with ICT

What will I find here?

Hopefully you will find this site interesting, informative and inspiring.  I would hope that, based on what you see and read, you will be encouraged to go back to your students with a fresh approach that engages the skills of your Digital Natives.

I suppose much of this is based on the saying

"If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll keep on getting what you've always got"

So I feel it is up to us to look a little bit outside the box and more importantly, outside our comfort zones in order to find a better pathway for some of our learners facing difficulties in an ever more pressured school environment

This project is based around a number of elements

• Removing the fear of failure from writing - making it feel failsafe
• Separating out the elements of:

• thinking and creating
  
• transcribing and recording
  
• re drafting and reviewing
  
• handwriting and outputting

• Defining the processes of:

• Creating -- expressing what we are thinking without limits – there are no spelling mistakes when we think
• Practising -- creating and revising as tools
• Sharing – communicating with the audience – printed paper output, handwritten output, published to web site, weblog, audio, video – the methods of outputting
• Succeeding at all stages - failsafe
• Celebrating outcomes and progress

• When engaging with the writing process, the creative process may be limited, due to stress or recall of past failures
  
• Some students, particularly boys, have an inability to transfer written information from one location to another with speed and accuracy

There are a number of free innovative and transformative technologies and software available currently that are worth some further investigation, as well as some commercially available items. Their use in education is probably quite sparse at the moment, but where there are areas of good practise, the feedback looks very good, both from teachers and the students.