Abstract
This chapter examines teachers' practices and strategies while using digital tools for writing. The chapter argues that when teachers use digital writing, they need to change their teaching strategies in order to ease their students' writing tasks. It also highlights the purposes of integrating digital tools for the writing classes and the challenges they face while adapting digital writing. The data are collected from teachers who work at schools, colleges, and universities, through a survey generated by Google forms. The findings show that integrating suitable digital tools requires mastering the use of technologies by supporting teachers' digital literacy skills before integrating them into classes to overcome any emerging challenges. This is to reinforce students to improve their writing levels. The chapter suggests more extended studies to examine students' attitudes and experiences with using digital tools and the impact of coronavirus pandemic on education.
TopIntroduction
Throughout history, humans evolved from using their drawing skills in cave paintings to invent writing, and countless inventions are originated from using low-tech tools to big fancy screens to teach younger generations. The aim was to educate generations about previous cultures and their lifestyles so that they could obtain the needed tools and skills to survive and overcome obstacles in life. This idea about low-tech tools has transformed into digital tools since the 21st century. For this purpose, stakeholders encouraged institutions to expose students to the digital world to improve the students’ language proficiency. Teachers varied their teaching strategies in such classes to suit the abilities of their digital native students who were born in the digital era. Digital natives are very comfortable with using technologies, but not for educational purposes (Bakla, 2019; Prensky, 2001). “Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet” (Prensky, 2001, p. 1). This fact has given the digital immigrant teachers, who were not raised in the digital environment, additional teaching issues to deal with.
The use of digital tools for teaching English language skills, mainly writing, has spread rapidly in all levels of education; starting from kindergarten into elementary school until higher education. This emerging phenomenon has influenced how educators use digital tools for a variety of learning skills for teaching multilingual learners who embraced multiple languages, knowledge of other languages, and strategies for multilingual writing (Alazemi, Sa’ad, & Al-Jamal, 2019; French, 2019). Teachers, henceforth, accentuate the importance of thoroughly looking at new types of genres in the digital contexts because “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (Prensky, 2001, p. 1). In this regard, there has been an immense use of diverse digital tools inside and outside the classroom.
Thinking about the connection between the digital world and writing skills, learners during the COVID-19: coronavirus lockdown have access to different technology tools. “With the spread of COVID-19 through non-pharmaceutical interventions and preventive measures such as social distancing and self-isolation have promoted the widespread closure of primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling in over 100 countries” (Mustafa, 2020, p. 1). Due to this sudden closure, billions of learners have been affected. Tools, such as emails, text messaging, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, instant messaging, WhatsApp, digital gaming, social networking, and a variety of applications and software enable learners to communicate with their teachers and classmates. Through different digital tools, learners could access other participants’ spaces and they are exposed to a variety of writing options that help them build a writing community where they interact and write more carefully. Many digital spaces also enable learners to connect to previous experiences and knowledge while constructing their digital writing. According to De Fina and Perrino (2019), through experiences in the process of writing their stories “that new light can be thrown on the types of new storytelling genres [orally and/or written] that are emerging” (p. 2). The situation of the lockdown and COVID-19: coronavirus crisis during 2020 forced educational systems all over the globe to turn to digital tools and distance/remote learning. Teachers and students found themselves in a new era in which teachers need to use digital tools like zoom to keep up with their students’ education. Snelling and Fingal (2020, March 16) indicate that “As the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread, schools around the globe are shifting to online learning in an effort to slow the spread of the disease” (para. 1). Turning to distance/remote learning required students and teachers to use different digital tools that spread rapidly in all levels of education. Even during the corona crisis, questions of digital teaching methods were largely raised, and questions about the digital tools were still considered important. There was a huge change in the educational system to suit the sudden situation when the coronavirus emerged. Through this crisis, this study emerged to examine how teachers cope with this sudden shift and what strategies they used, and the challenges they faced.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Literacy: The ability to master the use of technologies for successful in-class and distance learning and teaching while communicating with students inside and outside the classroom.
Distance Learning: A way of learning remotely without being in the classroom and interacting face-to-face with a teacher or classmates.
Digital Native: A person who grew up in the era of technology and consider computers and internet an essential part of his/her life.
Digital Immigrant: A person who grew up before the existence of internet, computers, and technologies, who needs to learn using technologies to cope with the current era.
COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic: A widely spread global health crisis that caused social distancing, remote learning, economic collapse, and political crises in 2020.
Digital Tools: Teaching and learning platforms and software with embedded audios, videos, images, and texts that are used via computers or smartphones.
Digital Writing: A digital multimedia way of writing that enables the integrating of digital technologies while writing a document through internet and computers.