Expert answer
Kids do a lot of writing online today. And they’re very motivated to do it. In fact, I don’t even believe they think in terms of motivation about doing it — it’s just something that they do often. And we want to harness that kind of enthusiasm in the classroom.
One way of doing that is to help students learn the difference between informal and formal writing. So when you tweet, it’s not going to be the same thing as academic writing, but we can use a tweet and bring it into the classroom and then talk about how we would need to change that for something that we write for the teacher. So we can bring in that online kind of writing directly into the classroom.
And there’s another way of thinking about this — that online writing allows us to share what we’re writing in the classroom with a much larger audience.