Internet Writing as a New Literacy

          The other day, I was scrolling the internet and saw the video the the right that someone shared. I was struck by the moment in the video where a classroom of the past and the present are compared.  Despite the fact that I personally find a number of flaws in the comparisons made, I did start to think more about what really could be done to change the way our classrooms have progressed.  I’m sure we’ve all probably seen complaints like this before—the examples of how classrooms haven’t changed in a hundred years—and, though I don’t always agree with the point these kinds of memes are making, I think the voices are right in asserting that there are important advancements and resources of our era that many teachers fail to use, particularly available through the internet.  The internet is an incredible resource that I think we as teachers could do a much better job of using it in our classes. 

 The internet involves a whole new literacy in itself with a vast potential for new ideas and forms of work. If you step back and think about it, nearly everything we do on the internet involves some sort of reading, even if it’s only the description under the YouTube video we’ve clicked on.  The same is true for writing.  In order to interact in media, it is highly probable that your students compose daily.  The multimedia and social possibilities of the internet make this kind of literacy extremely valuable for students to learn and for teachers to incorporate. In Dana J. Wilber's book, iWrite,  she claims that, “For students in my class to be literate...they needed to know how to make meaning from different text forms and communication modes and how to communicate through those modes” (9).  The more technology grows, the greater influence being able to manage it will have on our students’ futures.  It is an English teacher’s duty to teach literacy and now we have an opportunity to reach into a whole new field.  
We also can teach students valuable skills in research, copyright, and general media use that will improve their literacy all around, in reading, writing, and critical thinking.    Wilber also states that “Students need to know what tools to use to use to find answers to their questions, not just how to research within a framework of a paper assignment” (83).  Often, that latter part is how research papers come across to High School students.  They learn the skill set only for that paper and move on to more interesting things.  With the internet, though, the skills become relevant. Combined with these skills, the internet allows us to incorporate more of social aspects of rhetorical training.  There are communities all over the internet dedicated to the very things the students are studying at it would be wrong to not at least consider the influence that these sources might have on a student's ability to craft and express their own ideas.  There  much more too that the internet can bring to the classroom as we use it to connect with students in and our of class. 
 So, as teachers, rather than staring at new and rising technology like some form of witchcraft, the time has come for us to embrace what it is making our students do, how it is luring them into the elements of writing and teaching them what writing can accomplish.