Use Technology To Supercharge Your Students’ Writing
Stop seeing technology as a threat to traditional writing skills, urges Tim Head, and instead embrace how it can fire your pupils' imaginations and help put their work before an audience…
- by Tim Head
If there are two things that get me fired up in the classroom, it’s technology and English. When I get the chance to combine the two, I know it’s going to be a lot of fun for the students, and also for me.
While there are times when English needs to be taught in traditional ways (and I am all for this), there are some areas in which tech can have a big and hugely positive impact.
The advent of tablet computers and apps opened up new means by which children could write and publish their work for an audience. As we know for ourselves, when we’re writing something for an audience we’ll inherently ‘up our game’. The same is true of the students and their outcomes.
Writing for an audience
I am a huge advocate of giving children the chance to use and create film within their English lessons. I’ve previously used animations and video clips, such as those found at The Literacy Shed, to inspire the children to create their own writing around a theme. We’ve also used such clips to infer the feelings of characters; in fact, films clips can be used in many of the same ways that texts can.
Film is also powerful as a medium for letting children showcase their writing. Last year the students and I undertook a topic of work based around the resources available from ‘A Tale Unfolds’. The project involved the students writing extended descriptions, dialogue and script directions as part of creating a screenplay. As they questioned the effectiveness of their language and grammar choices, their became increasingly thoughtful and detailed.
Why was the exercise so powerful? The pupils knew that we would be showing their finished film to the parents and other members school community. We actually held a full film premiere, complete with popcorn, to give them a ‘real’ audience for their writing.
The use of technology in this instance didn’t replace handwritten English skills, but it did present the opportunity to transport the children from a small town in Nottinghamshire to the heart of the Amazon with the aid of a green screen. This helped to inspire and fire their imaginations, resulting in more ambitious vocabulary choices.
On other occasions we’ve created diary entries as though they were written by children living in similar situations to that Anne Frank and her family, using the green screen to read our diary extracts inside our own secret annexes. These were then edited and placed on the school website for parents to view.
Getting creative
As part of my passion for film within education I run an annual film and animation festival for the children of our town. One thing that has always amazed me in the submitted films in the quality of the writing leading to the final scripts. Whether they’re scripts for persuasive adverts created in the style of a well-known high street store, stories of alien invasions or documentaries, the writing has always shone through.
One thing that often puts people off using technology in the classroom is the perceived cost – yet all of the tools I have used to create the films have either been available for free or cost just a couple of pounds. Indeed, if you know where to look, there are plenty of cheap and free apps out there.
One of my very favourites is Morfo – an app designed as a fun way to create a face and make it talk. One of the options within the app allows you to take a picture of virtually anything and animate it. In doing so, we have brought Anne Frank, Vikings and even inanimate objects to life. That might all sound like a fun distraction from writing, it was actually used as a carrot to encourage high quality writing.
Another fantastic tool I have used for writing detailed descriptions of settings is Epic Citadel (iOS/Android) – an app created to showcase the features of a graphics engine used to create video games.
It allows to to explore a richly detailed (albeit unpopulated) world containing a church, market place and surrounding rural areas. The app’s numerous attractive vistas can be viewed in 360°, backed by a mellow soundscape of church bells, birds and running water.
I asked the children to select their favourite part of the Citadel and take a screenshot. We then used the resulting pictures to create descriptions of the scenes shown – and since they had previously experienced the setting in 3D with ambient sounds, we wrote about more than just what we could see.
Yet by far the most powerful element of using technology to support writing is the publishing element. Students’ work can now be easily shared with parents via the school website, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and dedicated sharing platforms. By celebrate children’s work in this way, we are able to set if free from books that might otherwise sit on shelves gathering dust. Give them an audience and see them fly!
Tim Head is a upper Key Stage 2 leader in a large Nottinghamshire Primary School and regularly supports schools throughout the local area in using computing in conjunction with English and other subjects.; he has also overseen the annual FAN (Film and Animation Newark) Awards for the past three years. Follow him at @MrHeadComputing
