Digital Writing Workshop

   Thinking back on the last classroom that I was in I would have to say that there were a variety of different individuals among the students that I had. I remember that they were separated into two different groups: the green class, which were the lower level students and the gold class, which were the more advanced group of students. Knowing the levels of all the students and what they were capable of, I knew that my green class would struggle with the digital world if I made it available to them. A lot of the students in the green class also came from a lower socio economic status so they had very little access and experience with computers. The gold class, however, knew how to do pod casts. For some of our projects that were required within the grade level, the computers were necessary for all students. They needed to be able to look up information and create a paper, or more, afterwords. The gold class had no problems with this project, however, when supervising the green class during this project, I found a lot of them stuck or playing with other things on the computer. I found it extremely helpful having four adults in the classroom because we were all able to walk around and assist the students with their projects on the computer.

   The one thing that we had in place in order to begin our digital writing workshop was a classroom set of laptops. The computers were shared within the grade level so they weren't for our classroom personally, but it was very useful to rent out the cart and have each student have their own computer to work on within the classroom. There was no need to travel down to the computer lab or the library to work on our writing pieces every time we needed to write. We were able to stay right in the classroom and work with the students individually in a more comforting environment for them. I also seemed to notice that it was a lot less distracting staying in the classroom and working then if we had been working in the computer lab or the library.

   Since I had two very different groups of students who were at two very different levels, it was hard to allow one group to do one thing when my other group couldn't. Even though my gold group was capable of creating a pod casts or a blog page for example, I didn't want my green class to wonder why the other class got to do those things when they couldn't. I just knew that at the level that they were at, that they weren't ready to learn how to create those type of things on the computer. Looking back, in order to make the digital writing workshop more successful, I would need more time with those students so that I could spend the time teaching the digital world to my green class. I would have loved to teach them how to create a blog page so that they could go online and write journals to me about the books that we read. I would have also liked to posts wikis so that I could have posted questions for homework that they would have had to go answer. I feel that if I would have had more time to accomplish this with my green class then I wouldn't have had to hold the gold class back and my digital writing workshop could have been successful.