iWrite: Using Blogs, Wikis, and Digital Stories in the English Classroom

by Dana J. Wilber

"It's not that our students aren't reading and writing, but that where and what they are reading and writing is off the school radar. We can build a bridge between the literate lives of our students outside of school and the literacies we want to teach them." --Dana J. Wilber The power of Dana Wilber's insight is in its simplicity. Students are texting, networking, and blogging- i.e., writing and reading- all the time, everywhere, just maybe in places we aren't necessarily paying attention to. Build on their authentic interest and motivation using the technologies they are already committed to and you've won half the battle. You won't believe how engaged they are; they won't believe they're learning for school. In iWrite , Dana shows you how to guide students through the complexity of new literacies, Dana deftly elucidates the lives of Millennials, those students growing up around the turn of the 21 st century, and the technologies embedded into their everyday reading and writing. She shows us how three accessible tools-wikis, blogs, and digital storytelling -can be used to scaffold learning for our students. And she demonstrates how they can help us address 10 key issues in the literacies of today's Let iWrite show you how to capture students' daily literacy practices and develop them for the kind of writing we want them to learn.

Genres: Teaching, Writing

152 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2010

About the author

Dana Wilber, an avid blogger and user of Facebook and Twitter, is not only a credible expert in both digital and print domains, but is also an authority in both theory and practice in education. She is an Assistant Professor of Literacy at Montclair State University in New Jersey and a former middle school balanced literacy teacher from Colorado.

Reviews

[Stephanie Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good links and a few lesson ideas. Otherwise this is one of those teacher books written by professors not currently practicing and not able to give you the nitty gritty or any data to support how this helps kids (I need this armor to keep the peace with my lawsuit-shy administration). I love using technology in my classroom, but hate that I have to learn everything the hard way in real time while introducing something to my kids like wiki, edmodo, etc. I'd love to read a book with chapters on these, lesson ideas, and troubleshooting tips (such as "kids don't know they need to close a word document before attaching it as a file to post/email so 20% of them are going to send you corrupted files"). This is not that book. Sigh.

Sidenote/kvetch to fellow teachers: we really need to stop calling kids "digital natives"! Terrible misnomer. If you need someone to text really fast or introduce your grandma to Twitter, absolutely I respect their authority. But basic keyboarding, Office suite, email, Google docs, icloud, knowledge of intranet and firewalls, even iMovie/moviemaker? Nope, epic fail. I'm going to be restructuring my fall curriculum next year to address this as these are pretty practical skills we should be teaching.

[Trisha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good resource for someone completely new to wikis, blogs, and digital story telling - the thrust of the book.