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Using online technology to create new audiences.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The K-12 Connection offers online support for elementary and secondary students as they learn how to write, work on their writing, and share their writing with a potentially global audience. The site uses online technology as a venue where teachers can share and access teaching ideas and techniques with previously inaccessible audiences. The K-12 Connection uses online technology to create new audiences for student writing and for teaching techniques.

Introduction

The Writing Studio is an online learning environment where users can learn to write, revise, receive feedback on their writing, and save their work in a private, password-protected environment. Based on the metaphor of the artists' studio classroom, a place where creative minds produce, critique, rework, and revise their work, The Writing Studio supports writers as they brainstorm, draft, revise, and publish their writing. Moreover, The Writing Studio is virtually situated on Writing@CSU, currently the largest Web site supporting writing and writing instruction, receiving approximately 50 million hits in 2004.

Currently, both The Writing Studio and Writing@CSU_ are directed toward university writers. Classroom teachers who had used The Writing Studio during their undergraduate and graduate studies expressed a need for similar resources for the K-12 classroom. In response to this need, the researchers developed the K-12 Connection, virtually situated on Letters@CSU, extending the online support provided by the Writing@CSU site to K-12 teachers and students. The purpose of the K-12 Connection was to create a set of resources for K-12 students and teachers by working with teams of teachers from selected northern Colorado public schools to develop new online instructional materials, writing tools, and course tools which can be accessed by writing teachers around the world. Although the system shares some design features similar to Blackboard and WebCT, the K-12 Connection allows educators to use technology to enhance writing instruction ranging from a focus on specific skills to treatments of larger rhetorical issues (Palmquist, 2006). In addition to offering course management tools such as e-mail, discussion, and exam options, for example, teachers using the K12 Connection can access over thirty teaching guides, ranging in topic from teaching with technology to writing across the curriculum. They can access writing, library, and ESL resources. The site can also help teachers generate instructional topics and learn instructional strategies.

Rhetorical Knowledge: Audience Issues

The Writing Studio concept is important because, for many students and teachers, writing is a solitary activity. Students often draft in the privacy of their homes, share their writing...