Digital Writing Matters
2.19.10 | Kevin Hodgson, one of the editors of “Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom,” which we discussed last month, is cheering the expansion of the National Writing Project’s “Digital Is” initiative. The initiative works to help support teachers and spread the word about classroom practices that “use digital media to teach young people how to write.”
In a separate post, Hodgson also points to a great slideshow (see below) from Troy Hicks, who’s been working on the National Writing Project’s forthcoming book “Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments,” along with Danielle Nicole DeVoss and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl.
Hicks defines digital writing as “writing and responding to posts on blogs, microblogs and social networks,” writing individually or in groups using wikis, and “composing multimodal pieces such as podcasts and digital stories.”
Hodgson says in this post that the slideshow and the book are worth a look because they lay out “the foundation for the New Literacy movement in the classroom, particularly around composition with media and technology.”
Plus: Writing on the PBS teachers blog, Media Infusion, Jenny Bradbury points out the importance of publishing student work and details a few opportunities to do so, including a writing contest from PBS and using blogs and wikis with students.
In additional to creating valuable opportunities for peer review and editing, Bradbury says that new digital tools can create needed opportunities for social learning. She points to this great article from John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.” The authors argue, among other things, that publicity and peer review can be powerful tools in affecting the volume and quality of students’ writing.
And in case you’re not already there, Bradbury also links to a lesson plan (PDF) from PBS to help get you started in the blogosphere.
Here’s the slideshow mentioned above:
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Mechelle De Craene (Florida)
2/22/10
9:38am
This is great!! I have also found that writing with students with special needs via blogs is very effective and motivating. Further, I used video games as a writing prompt. Here is an informal article I wrote for teachers back in ‘06 called Virtual Support Via the Blogosphere: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/files/Coming_of_age.pdf
The only thing now, is that teachers aren’t allowed to do much of what we could before. When no one knew what blogging was we could do it. We could venture out and try new things digitally and there were no filters.