Emerging technologies are shaping the future of education. Teachers and students are getting access to new tools and services, which allow mastering new skills faster and easier than ever before.
If you work in the field of education, you should watch the tech trends. You should stay informed about the most advanced software, which you can use in your professional practice. If you wonder how to apply the latest technology for teaching children and adults writing, just keep reading.
Collaborative Researching and Writing
The great news is that teachers can use technologies like Google Drive to enhance collaborative researching and writing. Working together onone essay, students join their efforts to reach a common goal. Learners can help each other in different ways: exchange links to trustful sources, proofread each other’s works, explain grammar rules in simple language, etc.
Google Drive and other similar services allow sharing books, magazines, and educational web recourses. So, today, students have access to the unlimited number of learning materials in the palm of their hands. It seems that nothing can stop modern people from improving their writing skills.
Blogging
Sometimes, teachers find it difficult to teach writing, because students lack motivation. In this case, it’s a wise decision to use blogging as a tool to encourage learners to practice their writing skills on a regular basis.
Melanie Williams, English teacher and blog contributor for WoWgrade.com, states: “As a rule, students don’t mind to try a role of bloggers. They find this task challenging, yet fascinating.” Consequently, if students start crafting posts and articles daily, they will significantly improve their skills.
WordPress, Blogger.com, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms are perfect for blogging. Students can use them for free to write their hearts out. It might help them to learn how to express their thoughts, how to engage readers and how to react to positive and negative comments.
Online tests
Online test has revolutionized the education system. Now it’s possible to check the level of the student’s writing skills automatically. There is no need to distract the teacher from his core activities because software can calculate a number of scored points just in a few seconds.
Moreover, students can use online tests at home to monitor their academic performance on their own. It helps learners to identify common mistakes and prepare for exam thoroughly.
Gamification
Not only children but also adults like to learn new things while playing games. This is a simple way to understand tricky grammar rules and memorize new words.
Teachers should use gamification as a tool, which can change people’s attitudes toward the studying process. While most of the students tend to believe that it’s a pretty boring task to learn writing, online games allow breaking this weird stereotype. Numerous scientific studies proved that gamification helps people to advance in writing.
It’s worth mentioning that gamification is extremely helpful for foreign language learners, who find it difficult to absorb tons of new information in a short period of time. Games help them to advance the studying process significantly.
Proof reading tools and services
Proofreading software helps students to learn from their own errors. When people type text in an MS Word document or use services like Grammarly, they get a notification about the mistakes made. In this way, technology helps learners to find and expose their blind spots.
Vanessa Peterson, an editor at Studicus.com, has this to say about proofreading services: “Today’s technologies not only point out spelling errors but also provides an explanation of how to correct them. This feature is extremely useful for people, who struggle to boost their writing skills.”
It’s crucial for every person involved in self-study. Those learners, who don’t have an opportunity to contact a teacher, can get some help from machines. For instance, the software can teach students how to use articles or when to put a comma in a sentence.
Screen casting
The last, but not the least important technology, which helps to teach writing, is screen casting. There are tons of tools available online, which allows users to capture the screen and to record the voice comments.
It let teachers create comprehensive online courses to teach writing remotely. The major benefit of online learning is open access to learning materials 24/7.
Thanks to screencasting, teachers can explain not only how to use grammar rules in practice, but also how to format and edit the essay. Students can learn useful tips, which will take their writing skills to the next level.
In Conclusion
The World Wide Web provides access to thousands tools and services, which professors can use to teach writing. Some of these tools and easy-to-use, others require specific knowledge and qualification. Nevertheless, the contribution of the digital technologies to the education sector is hard to overestimate.