Week 11
Writing and Grammar

With last week's readings and discussions, I realized that online tools have so much to offer especially for writing and grammar. They make the teaching and even assessment process easier and more effective.

For instance, using simple tools such as Wordle can be a great way to show the students their word choice in a piece of writing. This visualization can help the students to notice which words they use frequently and whether they need to replace some of these words with others. It can also be a good way to start a writing prompt. Students can be given a word cloud and students can create their own story based ont he words in the word cloud.

In addition, there are many writing tools available. Sites such as turnitin or writecheck helps writers to learn about citations. With writecheck, students can also get help on their grammar, punctuation and organization. Blogs and discussion boards can be other ways to provide feedback to students' writing. Video feedback or screencasting are some others and these have been proved to be effective in several studies. One of the tools I always use to give feedback is the review feature of Microsoft Word. It is simple, easy to use and it is always available once you save it.

I believe that especially for writing and grammar, computers and online tools should be incorporated into classes since they have so much to offer and since they can improve the students better in many ways compared to traditional activities.