Technology plays a crucial role when it comes to enhancing the writing skills of students.
When teachers combine technology with their writing instruction, they help students become good writers.
Since students are continuously engaged in a process of writing, they need to be familiar with writing methods and how to enhance them to better their skills using tools.
There are three traditional classifications of the writing process. They include:
- Pre-writing
- Writing/revising/editing
- Publishing
Pre-writing
Pre-writing is the first stage in the writing process which takes a lot of brainstorming information and ideas regarding the topic in view.
There are tools that help students come up with ideas and sort out ideas meant for their writing task. These tools are in three categories:
Writing prompts
A writing prompt is a topic around which ideas are built on. Students have the choice of sticking to the topic or letting their imagination take its course.
There are tools and sites like Google Sheets Random Writing Prompt/Emoji Writing Prompt Generator, Writer Igniter, Scholastic Story Starters, etc., that guide students through writing process while providing inspiration along the way.
Brainstorming
When students brainstorm, they get to collectively focus on the topic in view and contribute to the free flow of ideas.
There are tools like Google Documents, IdeaBoardz, Freeplane, MindMup, Coggle, etc., that are specifically designed to help students make the best of their brainstorming session by helping them ignite reasonable ideas, and collate and organize these ideas.
Concept mapping
Concept maps help students visually represent their ideas. They improve the visual thinking of students while capturing their ideas in students’ visual thinking and help them capture their ideas in diagrams.
Tools like Popplet, Bubbl.us, Creately, Lucidchart, MindMeister, etc., are great concept mapping tools for students to visually represent information.
Writing, revising and editing
The next step after students generate ideas and resources for their writing project is making sense of the whole information.
They can proceed to compile all of the resources and write, go through them to ensure the information is accurate and makes sense or edit in places where there is inaccuracy.
There are tools like Ginger, SlickWrite, After the Deadline, Help.PlagTracker.com, etc., that help students improve their writing styles, check for errors and ensure their work isn’t plagiarized.
Publishing/sharing
The last step for students to take after finishing their writing project is sharing the final result with either their classmates or their families.
Publishing and sharing tools like WordPress, Edublog, Quora, Medium, and social media platforms are great places to amplify what you have done.
Writing isn’t an easy task but harnessing technology to achieve the easiest and best result is definitely a plus for both teachers and students.
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