XO vs laptops in the feature article unit

The past two weeks the students have been completely immersed in the writing process with their feature article unit. Clearly, the students have become very comfortable with the XO’s, as if they had used them for a long time. As I sat in the back of the room helping a student edit their work, I took a glance at the rest of the class and witnessed any consultants dream; independently engaged students with all the necessary resources. The production and cooperation in this class has clearly changed since the last time I worked with the students in the memoir unit. Those memoirs were fantastic, but this unit entailed learning a new genre and a new technology. I have been very pleased with the outcome of this unit and am now planning the final publishing of their work on the TMI moodle site.

Today I played around with two documents; one on the xo and one on a pc.  Because they are feature articles, I pasted the work in a 2 column table so that the writing could look like a newspaper article.  I tried to copy and paste their work on the writingmatters ezine and found several things. I found out that the writingmatters website accepts the xo work in a two column table but not from the pc. Also, I didn’t have to change the font size to 12 on the xo document but I did have to on the pc document. However, a consistent problem is the slow speed of the xo. It’s not  a big difference, but with the lack of classroom time, I can expect impatient students getting somewhat frustrated if the xo is slow to boot. In time though, all of these students have gotten used to the pace of the xo.

As this xo pilot wraps up in the next week, Mr. Almanzar and I are discussing the implications of the xo in the writing process, technology and instruction integration, technology management, and classroom dynamics. Most importantly we are going to compare and contrast the work of the xo students from their previous genre and the current feature article. We will also evaluate the work of students from different levels; E.S.L, special education, level 1/2, and level 3/4. We will also look at the feature articles across the classes, making sure that we can gauge if and how the xo impacted the students writing.