Denton helps students find online voice

Published: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 2:00 am

By Amy Clarke
CITY PEOPLE WRITER

"Engagement in learning," Gail Denton says, is always the ultimate goal of teachers, from elementary school to college and from coast to coast. This summer, she will have the chance to tackle that very challenge as a presenter at the conference, "Teaching Writing in the 21st Century: An Exploration of New Practices and Literacies."

Invited to be a member of a five-person panel that will address technology in writing instruction, Denton has leapt at the opportunity to spread an idea she's been cultivating in her own classroom for years -- online communities.

"We don't have enough time really for every student to have a forum, but online every student has time and has that space to share work or to participate in the conversation," she says. "It's a richer kind of learning than we can always provide in the classroom."

Several years ago, before classroom computers and laptop labs made technology readily accessible, Denton established an e-mail exchange between her students and pre-service teachers at Clemson University. She hauled her own bulky desktop computer to school everyday so that students could keep the conversation going.

She says that experience led her to lok to other ways she could use technology in her future plans. Teachers, she says, are taking notice of the success of sites such as MySpace and looking for ways to tap into that wellspring.

"We're looking at how popular that is and thinking, 'How can we make something like that available to our students, and what can we take away from it?'" She says, "What we really need to be talking about is building these online communities where students have a purpose for posting online and discussing online."

To that end, Denton has done things like connecting with teachers at other schools to create conversations between students. Her Riverside Middle language arts eighth-graders shared poetry with Woodland Elementary fifth-graders, critiqued and commented on each other's writings, and shared thoughts on literature they had all read. She encouraged participants in the after-school writing program, Writer's Block, to use an online discussion board, one that eventually garnered more than 10m000 posts.

"When students are writing for real audiences -- especially those beyond the classroom walls -- and real purposes, they are more engaged in wirting and learning processes," she says.

Denton's hope is that all students will find technology to be a venue for engaging, learning and growing.

"Technology is one way we can make sure that everybody has a voice. It's a very democratic medium," she says. "For some students, it's their place to shine."