Commentary: Creating radio commentaries can get students talking

Engaging students in stimulating public discourse by creating, producing and editing content for a larger audience can be a transformative experience, writes Elisabeth Soep, who is research director and senior producer at the "youth-driven production company" Youth Radio. In this blog post, Soep offers tips on teaching students to write a radio commentary on subjects that are meaningful to them but may also resonate with others by touching on broader social themes.

Does Digital Media Make Us Bad Writers?

An English professor and a linguist examine how digital media are transforming students’ writing and how writing itself is changing.

Students Failing Because of Twitter, Texting

Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write properly. Details from this Canadian Press news story.

Texting, tweeting ought to be viewed as GR8 teaching tools, scholar says

Carol L. Tilley, a professor of libary and information science at Illinois, says that critics who equate texting with literary degradation are wrong, and that they also overlook the bigger role that texting and its distant cousin, "tweeting," could play in education and research. Details here.

Report: Technology may be a distraction for young people

From BBC News: The results of a study by British researchers suggests that the excessive use of technology is disrupting students' learning. The study looked at the habits of 267 pupils ages 11 to 18. Of the respondents, 39% felt that texting had damaged their writing and spelling skills; 84% said that they had copied content from the Internet to complete schoolwork

Virginia Middle School Explores Student Blogging as Teaching Tool

The Daily Press (VA) reports: Passage Middle School in Newport News, Va., will be maintaining class-related blogs written by students and teachers in every classroom. Principal Kipp Rogers hopes the blogs help educators assess student writing assignments. The blogs will be created with Edublog software, which includes content filters. Teachers will view every entry before it is posted and will control who is able to view the blogs.

TWITTER: Telling a story -- in 140 characters or less

Inspired by the micro-blogging service Twitter, a growing number of authors are crafting stories and poems in 140 characters or less, aiming to take advantage of Twitter's potential as a distribution channel for their creative output, Agence France Presse service reports.
In related stories:
- Two young college students write "Twitterature: Classic Literature in Twenty Tweets or Less" to recreate classic literature in a micro-novel format.
- Two "Ulysees" enthusiasts have come up with the idea of recreating a chapter from "Ulysses" on Twitter.
-In this Washington Post story, one professor says that using Twitter in the classroom teaches students to write concisely.