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Comment by Kimberly Byng on May 31, 2014 at 11:00am

For the first time in my ten years at my current secondary school a group of teachers have embarked on a collaborative teaching and learning workshop. Due to the poor grades in English at our school and low learning interest among students, I decided to try something new. Our school is plagued with so many infrastructure problems and resources are few. But I could either sit and complain or get up and try.

After much planning and many disappointments I finally got the approval of the Principal to launch the "I can Write Workshop" for fourth form students. It was an intervention to improve the story writing skills of students who were preparing for the CSEC Examinations in 2015. The workshop had to motivate and help students to self- regulate in their writing. It had to be different from the ordinary two periods of English. There were 10 lessons which were heavily infused with technology. The lessons included movie- clips, you tube videos, power point presentations, drama, music and internet usage. The students not only surprised teachers with their attentiveness and punctuality but participated in class discussion and really made an effort in their writing. This was a great achievement for my children! During lesson 4, I actually got goose bumps after reading students' poems about a happy character, when I saw what they were really capable of.  

Students were shown that writing is not just about a pen and paper with a teacher telling them what to write and how to write. They were taken on a journey where the technology they used on a daily basis was infused into the classroom. As such, they were shown how “Thor” from the Avengers Movie was a character with physical attributes and a personality that can be similar to the characters they write about. Use of the internet was now seen as a learning tool and not just a place for entertainment. I think this added to their learning and improved the quality of writing among students. Yes it was difficult to carry the projector and huge speaker box from the principal’s office to the classroom for each session. Yes it was a huge setback that we couldn’t get internet access from the classroom but we simply got around those hurdles because we were determined to. The response from the students was worth it!