Weebly, Wikis, and Digital Storytelling: The Potential of Web 2.0 Tools in Writing Classrooms

Introduction

In my undergraduate Language Arts course, I begin the semester with a simple exercise. I ask students to think back to the past week and make a list of the various types of writing they composed, their purposes for composing them, and their intended audiences. Drawing from personal, school, and work lives, students consider the types of writing they crafted. They have ten minutes to complete this exercise, but they usually finish in two. Typical responses are included in Table 1.

This past semester, when I asked students about their responses, one student explained, “I don’t write because I don’t really have time to write anything other than stuff for school. At work I write orders. At home I write lists of things I have to do. And at school I write papers for classes, but besides those things, I don’t write much else.” When students don’t view themselves as writers, they don’t see the types of writing they do every day in different forms.

I then asked the class to consider what they do online as readers and writers. Encouraged to expand on their charts, students began to identify the various ways they wrote within their online worlds. They considered what it meant to be 21st century writers, composing in an era where technology is ever-present, and using mediums such as smart phones and computers as platforms for their messages. With this lens, students broadened their lists to include the following in Table 2.