Hey.  Sorry this one is a little late.

I really wanted to delve into the issue of using digital tools on student writing.  The main concerns addressed in this article go back to an issue that I have gone over with other colleagues and fellow classmates, in the past.  Just how useful is technology in the classroom?  Is there such a thing as too much technology?

Again, for me personally, the answer is balance.  It is important that students can do the basics such as in-text citation and avoiding plagiarism.  DRE classes teach reading comprehension, but the biggest thing is teaching students to always give credit to the authors or sources they use in writing.  I taught this course, once before, and that was one of the harder lessons for my students to learn.  Sometimes, technology would be used as a tool to enhance the lesson.  For example, we would look at different examples with sources like Purdue Owl and I would encourage them to use sources such as Smartthinking to help them with the finer points of in-text citation. This also ties into my views on collaborative vs independent work.

It helps to teach students to work independently as well as within a group.  Students need to be able to do things for themselves, because they will not always be in a collaborative setting, in real life.  I like to teach the lesson, let them work in a group, then give them a chance to work on it by themselves.  Students need the right amount of collaboration and the right amount of independence.  They need the technology, but it helps to cover old fashioned basics first, as a foundation.

It all fits like building blocks.  If the technology ever fails or crashes, at least students have that foundation of the basics to still be able to function in formal writing.  The digital tools mentioned in the article "The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing" would be great for after the foundation has been establish.  When it comes to basic skills such as writing, technology works best as an enhancer to the learning process.