Emerging Technologies

Emerging Technologies

With the rise in online activity there are many opportunities and ways in which people can post their own personal writing. Many browsers now include text editing features which makes it easier for people to save their work and edit their work online instead of through a different software program. This makes it extremely easy for people to access their work and to edit it regardless of the operating system of the computer.

This article also discussed in depth about portfolios and how e-portfolios have grown in popularity. The growth of online portfolios has many positive implications for language learners. Language learners can track and see their progress and growth over time.

Not only do language learners have the ability to keep all their documents online, but there are also a variety of programs that can be used to assess writing as well. Not only do these programs check grammar but there are some that can also evaluate the writing sample and give a score.

The section of this article that interested me the most was the section regarding e-portfolios. I really want to use e-portfolios in my classroom and have been exploring many websites to find the best way to begin the project. I still have students keeping their work in manila folders and I keep those folders in a crate in the corner of my classroom so they don’t get lost. However, what I would love to do is to have the freedom to give the students the hard copies of all their work and to know that if they want to access their work they can just pop online and access it.

I’m glad to know that there are programs out there that can assess my students’ essays for me. It hink it would be interesting to see how the essay would differ if I were to assess it and if the computer program were to assess it. Since many of the programs just look at formulaic writing I wonder how many grammatical mistakes I would overlook due to the content or purpose of that written piece. It would also be interesting for students to run their own essays through the assessment program before they turn it in or before we meet for a teacher conference so they could identify and fix some of those errors on their own.

Godwin-Jones, R. (2008). Emerging technologies web-writing 2.0: Enabling, documenting, and assessing writing online, 12 (2), 7-13.