Blog #11: Dominic Lopez

                      I wanted to discuss the following aspects of the readings for this week: 

1.) I really enjoyed how the text goes into detail how online courses can affect the way students write in their discussions with one another and use rhetoric in their writing to each other in their discussion posts. The initial tendency for when students write in online discussions is to write responses with minimal effort or to simply agree with each other’s posts instead of forming their own arguments or ideas to bring to the discussion. However, a teacher can make comments on student’s written responses and tell them how they can make their written comments include more content and be more well-written. One advantage that I can see for teachers using an online course to teach writing is that when students are peer reviewing each other’s drafts, the teacher can see all of the comments they make to each other in their posts online to see if they are writing useful and well-written feedback for each other’s drafts. A teacher can monitor a student’s progress with how they are improving in their writing over time through going through each of their written posts online and moderate how well the discussions are proceeding more effectively through online posts since they can do it with all of the students at the same time through a post. 

2.) An idea that I thought was helpful with teaching online writing classes that the text included in this week’s reading is for the teacher to assign students each week to moderate the written class discussions online. Giving students the opportunity to lead a written discussion allows them to gain confidence in developing their rhetoric skills in their writing when they introduce new topics or arguments to move the discussions along. It requires them to make more of an effort in their written discussion posts and written responses to other students because the teacher will hold them more responsible if the discussion between students is low effort and not productive. Since writing is not an isolated activity that needs to have dialogue to find new ideas for a piece of writing, having a student moderate a written discussion encourages the practice of sharing your writing with others and using the things that come up in your discussions to improve your writing.   

  

3.) Another aspect of teaching writing online that I liked from this week’s reading that is described in the text is the use of digital tools and programs to improve the feedback teachers give to students on their drafts. With students in today’s world being more comfortable with being online frequently, they may be more receptive to receiving feedback on their drafts with the use of digital tools and programs as opposed to the negative psychological effect of seeing their papers marked up with a red pen. An example of a couple of digital tools for providing feedback on student’s papers that I thought would be useful would be using a digital program to record yourself speaking your thoughts aloud on their papers as you read their papers and using commenting boxes to highlight certain sections of their papers. This way, students can follow along your thought processes of how you are assessing their papers and go back and forth as needed as well as access your comments at any time since it is a recording. They can understand better what you meant by a certain comment because they will hear your tone and inflection in your voice and see how you came to make that comment since they are following along you reading their papers.