emerging from the pit

I've been woefully behind on my blog. It's the end of the school year and I have been buried in a pit of research papers and literary analysis essays. I am finally beginning to emerge from the "pit of despair"and rejoin the land of the living (and the land of the bloggers!)
As I've been wallowing in my grading responsibilities, I've been pondering how technology might change the role of the English teacher in the years to come. Although I have occasionally used the "add comments" feature on Word to offer comments to my students on drafts, I find the program cumbersome and only use it for a few papers -- when I have whole class sets, I use the trusty colored pens instead and put my reflections in cursive on the student essay. Some of my colleagues have begun to use blogs to continue class discussion outside of school, but not in replacement of composing actual essays.
In the fall, two of my fellow English department members attended a teacher workshop focused on brain research. The presenter discussed the ways that the brains of today's teenagers differ from the brains of the teenagers of the past. Since these youngsters have grown up with a myriad of technology, they are "hardwired" to respond to technology.