Writing Has Changed, Have You?

I come from a family of teachers and despite running for the technological hills myself, still wound up marrying a teacher, so I’m surprisingly familiar with schools, teaching and technology in schools. It also helps that I’ve had a couple of jobs running IT in schools and I’ve always kept an interest in how technology is being used to aid teaching.

It should come as no surprise then that I was quite interested in Mark Ahlness’ post about a new WYSIWYG editor being added to the blog software his third grade students have been using. Now firstly, it’s cool that third graders are blogging – it gives them an interesting place to practice writing and by being interesting and novel, hopefully develops an interest in writing. After all, behind most learning there’s fun and passion.

Allowing teachers to teach writing in this new medium is, for me at least, huge. Now, I’ve of course got kids who will go nuts over fonts, colors, pictures, links, etc, etc – because they look so cool. Some teachers see this as a nightmare. OMG, the kids are just going to waste their time, etc, etc. Well, get a grip and teach them, I say. To me this is a dream come true – a chance to teach my kids that, as much as content, design matters – to borrow a phrase from Dean Shareski. And content does indeed come first, yes it does. This is the point where we all learn from 3rd graders. Design matters and design is as much a part of the actual content as it is part of the site layout. Having an editor that lets users express their meaning rather than just enter text is really important. If you’ve locked your CMS down to the point where content authors can’t do anything but write text, you’ve probably gone too far and you’re now through out visual content – not just formatting. The key is in finding the balance and I’m really glad to see that third graders are getting the opportunity to experiment and find that balance because that’s the only way to learn.