One More Thought: Changing The Writing Process

One more thought about that 21st century article. It makes the point that technology changes the writing process. This is striking to me as I'm talking about the writing process this week. I admit I always feel disingenuous talking about this because it's one of those times I'm teaching the kids to do something I don't do.

I very rarely "prewrite." Usually I just start typing.

So I like the idea of looking at blogging as prewriting/publishing. But that sort of crushes our traditional notion of the writing process, doesn't it then.

We're supposed to, when we grade writing and include it in the portfolio, represent "all stages of the writing process," which is supposed to mean prewriting, outlines/graphic organizers, first draft, revised copy, and then final draft. It's a good point to make that if we're doing all our writing online and revising within a Word document, the draft/revising/editing part of the process looks very different and leaves a different artifact trail. Not that I really have to worry about this right now since I do not have enough computers in my room to have every kid working through the writing process on a computer.

That's something to think about.

On a kind of side note, I got this year's class blog up (www.kidblog.com - great classroom tool) and running. The kids loved blogging last year and I'm excited to have a whole year to work on it with my kids (as opposed to 3 months last year.)