Kaelie Larsen's List: Personal Testimony

• Technology and writing go hand in hand in the lives of students today
• rather than fight societal changes
• we benefit if we embrace technology and make it work to our advantage
• As teachers, we have an ever-changing job because the students who enter our classroom doors today will not be the students who enter tomorrow.
• some teachers are not comfortable with all that technology is affording us, our students are, and we need to be
• It is our job to embrace our students' ways of experiencing, ways of learning, and ways of being and use this knowledge to our benefit both in and out of the classroom.
• These young writers are creating multimedia projects with such voice and such emotion about their families and themselves. They are passionately explaining the highlights of kindergarten so that next year’s class will know what to expect
• The use of technology enhances the engagement, revision, audience awareness, and presentation aspects of the students’ writing
• very own movies with Flip video cameras
• ; it is a documented recording of their writing
• It is almost magical when the students see themselves as real writers for an authentic audience and see that there is a true purpose behind their writing.
• my teaching practice for the better
• My students understand revision, appreciate the role of audience, have become better communicators
• All of these realizations came about because I first experimented with technology myself. In order to create a digital story that I was satisfied with, I needed to revise several times and found myself continuing to do so even after I started recording my voice. I searched for photographs to match my text. The audience to whom I was writing was very clear in my head, and that helped to guide the writing I created. The learning experiences I had when using technology are the same experiences I witness my students have when they use technology.
• The students’ behavior made me truly aware of the importance of audience and communication as well as the real work of revision.
• One of the great things about technology is you can start to implement it without all the answers and it holds the power to help guide our teaching.
• . Not only are they proud of the content of that which they created, but they are proud of the professionalism of the creation, as well as how independently they are able to do so

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