Thoughts on the Digital World of “Screenagers” and Digital Report cards

The Eastern Sierras and some crazy cloud action

Reading “Turn teen texting toward better writing; Teachers who co-opt web tools for class have the best of both worlds”, affirmed the success of including digital forms of writing that students are accustomed to using in their daily lives. Justin Reich points out that as teachers “the most productive option is to listen to our teenagers and bridge the gap between their social and academic worlds”. I agree with Reich. I know in my own classroom, students preformed greater on assignments that included digital technology than on the traditional pen and paper assignments. While Reich’s article focuses on including digital writing for teenage students, I can attest that digital writing is practiced by a larger age demographic. College aged students not only e-mail, text, blog, and IM, but also belong to chat groups, “mommy boards”, political web groups, etc. I feel that these digital writing tools can also be useful in building writing skills in a writing classroom. However, as a gal who grew up in the old school-pen and paper-English classroom, I find some technologies less “academic” and harder to include in the classroom but hopefully, I can find ways to manipulate them into something educational.

As I read, “Balto. Co. to Overhaul Report Cards”, I saw both some pros and cons to their new report card system. I feel that there are many benefits to directly e-mailing a child’s report card to a parent. It would be cost free, as no postage fees would apply. It would eliminate the possibility of student tampering or thieving before parents viewed it (Ha, I speak from experience). It would also be faster than traditional mailed grade reports. In addition to the electronic aspect, as a parent I saw many advantages of the new grading scale. The additional information that would be provided could be a very useful tool to parents and allow them to work with their child in the areas and specifics that needed improvement. However, as a teacher I also see the downside of this system and realize that more information on the report card means more work for the teacher. However, I would have to say that the extra work could possibly benefit the instructor if the parents work with their children in the necessary areas.