Digital Technologies and Writing in Students' Communicative Practices

The promises and pitfalls of computers' uses at school have challenged researchers' and teachers' understanding about what these machines mean to students and how students use and make sense of them to learn. This book presents a new, critical perspective about the topic by explaining, based on an extensive ethnographic study conducted in Brazil, how high school students engage with computers to write at school and outside of school and what that experience mean to students. The study is framed by the new literacies theoretical perspective and also by the Vygotskian contextualized notion of practice. The book helps researchers and teachers understand how digital technologies can help but also how they can hinder students' abilities to communicate and to write depending on certain characteristics of their contexts that may interfere with their practices with digital technologies. Finally, the book offers insights on how to overcome these difficulties and take advantage of students desire to communicate with computers to further learning at school. The promises and pitfalls of computers' uses at school have challenged researchers' and teachers' understanding aboutwhat these machines mean to students and how students use and make sense of them to learn. This book presents a new, critical perspective about the topic by explaining, based on an extensive ethnographic study conducted in Brazil, how high school students engage with computers to write at school and outside of school and what that experience mean to students. The study is framed by the new literacies theoretical perspective and also by the Vygotskian contextualized notion of practice. The book helps researchers and teachers understand how digital technologies can help but also how they can hinder students' abilities to communicate and to write depending on certain characteristics of their contexts that may interfere with their practices with digital technologies. Finally, the book offers insights on how to overcome these difficulties and take advantage of students desire to communicate with computers to further learning at school.