Mining PEW

Percell, K. (2013).  The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing

is Taught in Schools. PEW Internet.  Retrieved on July 29, 2014 from   http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_NWP%20Writing%20and%20Tech.pdf

 

I was interested in this topic because digital tools are now so wide spread and being found in schools more and more.  I was interested in finding out if student writing has suffered or if it may have helped students in developing better writing skills.  This research took a survey of Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers and surveyed how digital tools have affected students in writing.  In one survey the teachers rated their students writing skills as either good or fair in nine different areas.     

Two of the graphs that were quite informative were the ones that gave percentages of how much writing the teachers gave the students throughout the school year.  Writing that were assigned were based on different subjects varying from Math, Science, Journal writing, Essays and many other writings.  The graph indicated how often these writings were like if they were weekly, monthly or more or less often.   

 The teachers did notice that students today are expressing themselves more than they had in the past.  However, there is a big concern for students building on their grammatical skills and vocabulary due to the ever increase of digital tools being used.  With more and more students using internet, cell phones, and social networking students are using what is known as “textspeak” for writing.  This is so common today with so many young ones texting and using abbreviations while texting that they begin to use that in everyday writing.  I liked how it mentioned that it has become acceptable to use incomplete sentences, misspellings, abbreviations and informal tomes.  That is so true because even I find myself writing in incomplete sentences, and using abbreviations like u for you and r for are.  Despite the fact that grammatical skills and vocabulary are a concern the teachers agreed that digital tools have benefited students with sharing information with a greater audience and have been able to be more creative and expressive.      


Many of the teachers that were surveyed were themselves up to date with technology and used it for instruction then they were helping their students to use many forms of technology to share their class work.  Teachers were using interactive whiteboards, and would have students participate in sharing work on websites, GoogleDocs and participate in blogs as well.  I can see that technology when used properly can be beneficial for students in the classroom.  What is most important is gearing students in the right directions and helping them keep social and academic activities separate. 


Report Length:   114 pages
Count to Date:  144/150