The Power of CyberEnglish

I am still amazed at the power of CyberEnglish. The young scholars are still excited about creating their own webpage. They see the difference between it and their MySpace page. They like the idea that they are in control, have the power to alter and mix it up on a webpage. They are finding their strengths as they learn how to figure out HTML and then make their page do what they want it to do.

As we have progressed, one of the aspects that most astonishes them is the feedback. No sooner have they begun to write then their teacher is talking to them about their writing. The teacher is commenting as they write. They have been told to save often, so as they do this their work is instantly published and is accessible by their teacher. After each class, I go to each scholar page and print out the work they have done that day so they have feedback for the next class.

We use Geocities. They start by creating their main homepage and then make links from it to each project. I instruct them as to the name of these files, so I can find them easily, if they have made a coding mistake. I also instruct them to save often, so that they don't lose any work if we have a technical glitch and so that I have access so that I can see what they are doing. Sure I can walk around, but I have found that my strolling about can be distracting. Rather I like to sit at my computer and watch them work fro my two computers. One computer has the capability of viewing any computer in my lab and the school and my other computer is used to view their pages. I use view source on their pages, copy the code to notepad, change the text to double space and print those pages for corrections.

This is all very new for all of my scholars, which actually surprises me since power has been available for nearly 16 years now. The power is my immediate access to their work unlike some other technical tools like blogs, wikis, moodle, and other web 2.0 tools. Having the computers to view the computers in my class and to view the work online provides me so many tools as a teacher to work with my scholars as they need it. What really stuns to me still is that teachers still use the old tools of teaching writing to teach writing when so many know how cumbersome and ineffective they are.

Just in a short two weeks I am very pleased with their work and their responses and comments in their journal about this process and their own investment in the process. they see the relevancy and appreciate the new approach to writing. Interestingly enough, the response from the scholars today to walking into an English class filled with computers is a far cry different from what it was when I first started this class, 16 years ago.