Holly's Response

I really enjoyed this article.  Particularly, I enjoyed the portion on current composition and how technology has affected the process of composition.  Perhaps it's the computer geek in me, but I love to use technology in writing and composing and I think that our students are using it more and more too.  And, a good majority of the time, it's not forced.  Rarely do you have to force a high schooler to use facebook or some other social networking site.  In fact, you usually have to force them to stay off a site like that and get to work on their homework.

The examples the speaker/author gave in this article of how students have used technology for composition showed how creative our students can be.  I think with all the tools that we have available to us now, students have many more opportunities to compose than they used to.  I think this could be an interesting tool to use with students to encourage composing in general.  Use twitter, use facebook, use a blog.  I think all of these can (and will) encourage students to put forth their thoughts.  Which I think is one of the main things we want students to do.

In the "Beyond Strategies" article, I enjoyed the comparison of the two teachers.  After reading about their classrooms, I know which I prefer, but I wonder what the students preferred?  Which helped the students become more effective writers?  I really enjoyed the ways that Ms. Barrera structured her class and gave the students more responsibility for their writing.  While this may have driven me slightly crazy when I was school (I like things to be very spelled out for me), I appreciate the freedom and flexibility she had with teaching writing.  I also enjoyed the way she used peer review and the way she modeled writing for the class.  Ms. Gonzales seemed to be the opposite in many ways.  From my personal opinion, she was much too rigid.  However, perhaps this worked for her students.  I've never tried to teach 5th graders how to write, so maybe I'm wrong.  However, at this time I prefer Ms. Barrera's style of teaching.