Chapter 4: Fostering Collaboratve Digital Writing

The digital benefits of implementing a wikis format to promote and expand collaborative project and writings can spark critical thinking as well as improve writing skills. The collaborative approach to learn requires students to become more proactive in their learning; thus, taking them off the sideline and encouraging them to become actively engaged. This modality can easily be useful in my junior and senior English classes, especially when responding to and when intrepreting literary readings. In the past, I relied on short daily quizzes to assure students had read the assigned sections; however, it was frustrating to get all students to willingly discuss the various aspects---only a few "reliable" individuals would respond.

If and when I can convince our technical support person to install wiki, which hopefully is already offered by our Internet service provider. The software would permit students to move into a wiki program so that they could not only share their researched data but could also organize the tagged information.

Using technology within the classroom is becoming more essential as teachers prepair students for their futures; however, it will require me to not only convince our tech-person but also stepping out a faith---learning how to maneuver through the wiki framework---knowing enough to introduce this one tool to my students.