State of the Field: Teaching with Digital Tools in the Writing and Communication Classroom

Recent rapid technological change has influenced the ways writing and communication teachers and students use digital tools in their classrooms. We surveyed 328 writing and communication teachers about their use of digital resources in the classroom, in planning, and in course management. Our study finds that over one-third of teachers either teach themselves or use their existing knowledge to support digital pedagogy; learning management systems are used overwhelmingly to distribute materials; teachers perform a range of teaching tasks with both digital and non-digital tools; and teachers often depend on familiar, commonly available resources to perform teacher and learner actions. We recommend that the field should offer more targeted training for writing and communication teachers about the use of digital resources, support development of a repository of crowdsourced best practices, advocate for teachers to become stakeholders in the development and selection of digital resources to encourage more deliberate and targeted use of digital tools, and systematically collect information about digital resource use in the field.