I have just spent an hour or two responding to teaching narratives posted on our “virtual campus”. I just had a thought that I wanted to jot down…
It seems that teachers who choose to type their narratives in a word document and attach them to the forum write longer accounts than those who type directly into the text box on the forum. I wonder if this is really so, I should look into this. I have a feeling that those who attach a file are more computer confident than the others, it will be interesting to investigate how this reflects in their writing.
Back to my responses – hope to write more in the morning!
That’s an interesting observation, and certainly one worth further investigation. I tend to think, however, that it’s less an issue of computer confidence than it is of not feeling pressured. A relatively small text area “invites” a relatively short comment. An open-ended Word document offers the opportunity for greater reflection, as well as for editing, and even saving and returning to the text somewhat later to review what’s been written.
This might suggest a correlation to computer confidence, except that perhaps the opposite can also be the case – those more confident can “think” straight into a forum text box, while those less confident may feel the need to write something out first in Word.
Both seem possible to me, which I suppose confirms that this is something worth investigating.
Thanks for your thoughts, Yankel.
I have been thinking about this again, this time in relation to my grade 5 – 6 students.
This week I was marking tests the students did on the “Ofek” web site- http://ofek.cet.ac.il/ and found myself wondering about the same question. The children were asked to write about a personal experience relating to the moral of the fable they read during the test. I noticed that the text box supplied was very small and narrow and that few of the pupils wrote beyond the visible area of the box.
I imagine many of the students use the size of the box as they do lines on the page of a hard copy test as a guide to how much writing is expected.
This is certainly a topic I will look into further , when I have the time…