Using Technology to Support Creative Writing: How It Affects Teachers’ Digital Writing Skills and Their Gains from Digital Technology

Abstract

With the advances in technology, the skill of writing has taken on a new form with digital tools. Concepts like digital literacy, digital writing, electronic writing, web-based writing, online writing, and multimodal texts have become increasingly common. Hence, integrating technology into writing education in schools today has gained significance. This way, students can write digitally and produce digital texts in harmony with their lives outside of school. Teaching these skills to students is only possible to the extent of the teachers’ digital writing skills, digital writing habits, self-efficacy in using technology, self-efficacy in preparing digital teaching materials, and improvement of these skills. In this context, the current research aims to investigate the effects of web-based creative writing practices on teachers’ digital writing skills, digital writing habits, self-efficacy regarding digital education technology standards, and self-efficacy in developing digital teaching materials. For this purpose, we used the experimental method “one-group pretest-posttest design.” The data were collected from a total of 40 teachers: 20 classroom teachers and 20 Turkish language teachers. We carried out 16 creative writing activities where the participants performed digital writing. In seven of these activities, the participants received information and observed examples of digital tools that can be used in writing education or created texts using various digital tools, like tools for creating digital stories and cartoons. For data collection, we used certain data collection tools before and after the writing activities. We analyzed the data using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test, the paired samples t-test, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test via the SPSS 20.0 software. We interpreted the data and presented it in tables. We concluded that web-assisted creative writing practices had positive effects on teachers’ digital writing skills, digital writing habits, self-efficacy regarding digital education technology standards, and self-efficacy in developing digital teaching materials.