Digital natives, digital creators ...illiterate writers?

The Knew Illiteracy - North&South October 2014 

"If teachers themselves aren't confident to teach writing skills, you're going to have problems." 

(Jonathan Anderson -director of Kip McGrath) 

This worries me, as someone who over thinks things, I spent a lot of time agonising over my spelling ability before I started teachers college. Do I need to be able to write and spell to be a teacher? Do I need to understand all parts of speech, the correct use of the apostrophe and what an Oxford comma is? 

Jo Morris president of New Zealand association for Teachers of English states essays she wrote in the 1970's and that received excellence then are not up to current levels of deep thinking we expect from students now.  I agree, due to conceptual education we have moved on from writing recounts of our holidays and are now expecting students to inquire into the world around them and report, narrative or explain that world. 

Should we let kids go with their content and ideas or should we drill them with punctuation, grammar and spelling? There is also the debate of should we teach handwriting?

This article argues both sides of the debate. Students in 2014 are creative thinkers but lack the skills to write in correct sentences. Society is craving creativity yet we consistantly judge students on the surface features of their writing. Spelling, hand writing and grammar are all things that can be fixed by a word processor. By the time students get to us in year 7 what changes can we make to their atrocious unreadable handwriting? Students often say when asked what their goal is in writing they say they want to improve their handwriting. 

There is research to prove more text is being written and read than ever before, however most if it is concise and web-based. We should encourage students to read more traditional texts, such as novels, but also share and model concise digital web-based texts that are well written. 

Next term I plan on teaching my class cyber-safety and look at how we communicate now and in the past. I want them to view and analyse blogs, tweets and status updates and determine what makes them 'good' just like we would with exemplar pieces of writing. I will attempt to ensure our own are grammatically correct.