February 2002 — Features
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Fostering the Student-Centered Classroom Online
Instead of only meeting once on the progress of the writer, the electronic portfolio allows us to meet several times during the year to assess the student's writing as they publish it to the Internet. The electronic portfolio serves as a record of their work in progress. Each time the student visits the portfolio to revise their work, they also revisit previous projects, thereby gaining insight into their growth as writers. Though my students still maintain their writing portfolios for the state, they get a lot more out of their regular visits to the electronic portfolios. As we have endeavored in this process, my students have grown more comfortable with themselves as writers and with the idea of sharing their writing on the Internet.
Online Literary Discourse
The electronic portfolio section of the Web site turned out to be a great forum for formal student writing. Students wrote solid expository papers and improved upon their work as the year proceeded. For the latest version of the classroom Web site, I was looking for an innovation that would allow student writers to publish to a forum without sending it to me first - I wanted them to write informally about a subject. I used Microsoft FrontPage to create an online game we called "think-it link-it." It is a verbal rhyming and syllabification guessing game that I thought would be great online to encourage students to visit the site and post their own contributions. It turned out to be a popular game with many students participating. I put the game up to see if students could get to the site and participate from home. That meant publishing to the site without a teacher's editorial gaze looking over students' shoulders. Trusting my students with this much freedom was risky, but it never got out of hand. Instead, I received earnest contributions and genuine student excitement about the interaction.
With the knowledge that software could be used to allow students to publish online in a trustworthy way, I set about creating an online literary exchange of Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying. These online exchanges between my sophomores and senior A.P. students exceeded our expectations. Students who were free to respond to teacher-generated prompts made the most of the experience. I often found myself comparing the ease of the electronic setup with the drudgery of a teacher collecting their correspondence to give to their partners, only to return the following class with responses that didn't even approach depth. Our exchange was instantaneous and rapid. The printed version of the exchange was 296 pages. It was then that I realized how important technology had become to successful writing.
In addition, the students' writings were terrific. Because my sophomores wanted to sound like an authentic audience, they used dictionaries and thesauri to phrase their ideas as accurately as possible. They bounced ideas off of oneanother before they typed them out. Students explored the book and the discussion as if they were inspired by what they were doing. The students used noms de plume to correspond, further liberating them to write what they felt. Students began writing extra entries, and keeping up became a difficult task. I realize now that the project's success was the result of it being student centered. Students were writing without regard for the teacher so much as each other. I merely pointed them to a prompt or two, and they took it from there.
