As I reflect on our experience in the CRWP Summer Institute, and prepare for a visit to the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, as well as the NWP Annual Meeting in just a few weeks, I am trying to capture some thinking about the core principles that I employ in planning PD experiences related to technology.

I know that my colleagues at BSWP, as well as in other sites I have visited and continued to communicate with, are continuing to think about how, when, and why to integrate digital writing into their site’s work. So, I am offering some thoughts about what we have done in our first two years at CRWP, and how technology informs and is infused in our site’s work. By taking the intentional stance that we are and will continue to be a “digital writing project,” I know that there are certain benefits and constraints that this creates for us, and I will hope to address some of them here, too.

Summer Institute
In the CRWP SI, we engage in digital writing from the moment we meet participants on orientation day. We regularly use our wiki as a space to share our daily agenda and discuss texts such as Because Writing Matters and Teaching the New Writing. (Kathy and I are going to present at the Annual Meeting about our
experiences with doing the readings and sharing responses through
digital means, and I wonder what value others see in the responses to
the texts that are evident in the links here.) We also use Google Docs to create and share materials for our teaching demos, as well as creating our collaborative response to teaching demonstrations with our writing groups. In addition, we explored digital stories, Voice Thread, and podcasts, ultimately leading to the production of a print, audio, and video anthology of our work from the summer.

From both our conversations with colleagues during the summer institute, as well as from comments that they made on evaluations at the end of the summer, we know that this stance of integrating technology as a core expectation of participation in CRWP is both a selling point for teachers as they consider participation, yet also generates much frustration in practice. At least two veteran teachers discussed their interest in joining CRWP because they knew it would push them to use technology, yet continued to share their frustrations with the pace at which we moved (I couldn’t even log into the wiki because I lost my password, I couldn’t access the Google Doc that we were all supposed to share…), yet with support from colleagues and our SI leaders, they were able to (eventually) get into the sites we were using. Everyone created a digital story this summer, and everyone submitted a digital portfolio.

So, I continue to think that an immersive experience, one in which participants are expected to use technology and supported in that use through just-in-time instruction is a hallmark of a digital writing project. The expectation, for instance, that we would all use Google Docs to create collaborative responses to teaching demonstrations let to some unique discussions that were, initially, focused on how to use Google Docs, but eventually allowed us to use the technology transparently, and contributed to our experience in the response groups. That is, we were able to use Google Docs as a way to both focus our face-to-face conversation and allow everyone to contribute to the response, even though each group usually picked one “scribe” to be the main person responsible for each letter.

On a less positive note, we did find that participants, over the course of the summer, were using technology more and more to facilitate their own distracted behavior. One day while I was gone, for instance, my co-leaders told me that people were essentially ignoring the presenting teacher and focusing only on their laptops and cell phones. This led me to have a brief, yet pointed discussion the next day with the group about laptop etiquette; while we were fortunate to be in a situation where we could all use laptops, we needed to think — both from the perspective of teacher and student — about the advantages and disadvantages of using laptops. As teachers, helping students know when and how to use the laptops for learning purposes is critical, as well as the idea that we sometimes need to have “lids down” moments where we focus on each other, not just on our screens.

Still, having the expectation that we would all engage in experiences mediated by technology creates a different vibe in our SI. It means that we come to the institute with our own literacy and technology goals related to using the laptops for our own writing and for teaching writing. It means that we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate, and that those connections and collaborations are a core part of our lived experience as readers and writers in the institute. It also means that we make our work public, at least in the sense that everything we do is shared with at least our writing groups, sometimes the whole group, and sometimes the world. It makes the accountability for sharing a teaching demo and our own writing even more than it would be if it were only shared on paper, and that sense of audience and purpose, I feel, makes a huge difference in how our TCs see themselves as teachers and as writers.

Professional Development
Last year, we were able to be involved in two professional development series. In the first, we were able to meet with teachers five times over the year, and in each session we introduced a new technology (wikis, wikis part 2, Google Docs, podcasting, digital stories). In the second, we worked with teachers in a variety of contexts, but in the last two sessions we were able to work with cross-content area teachers to develop wiki pages. In both of these series, we had some teachers who were highly engaged in the process, some who were engaged, yet timid, and some who didn’t really seem to be interested in the technologies we were discussing.

This is a similar pattern for what I see in many PD sessions, and it makes me wonder what my/our responsibility is in offering background/context for why and how we should be using technology in the teaching of writing. While I have noted this before, and I do feel that the conversation about technology and teaching has, generally, moved from the “Why should we?” perspective to the “How should we?” one in the past few years, I am still reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for technology  and that we need to situate our stance about digital writing when doing PD, especially for the “non-voluntary” types of work that we often do in schools, where teachers may not have had a choice in participating due to district mandates and expectations.

As I think about where we are at and where we are going to go next with our PD services, I am curious to learn more about how we can offer online and hybrid options to help teachers customize their own experience. While I know that this isn’t always possible, I am curious to see what we might be able to do to help teachers create and sustain their own personal learning networks within the context of a writing project. I am looking forward to what Sara, our tech liaison, and Rita, our PD coordinator, come up with in terms of how this might work with our current PD series and future advanced institutes. I don’t have all the answers, but I excited that we continue to explore the questions.

Continuity
While we hosted a few continuity events last year, this year we hope to do more. One way that we are trying to connect with our TCs is by sending out more messages through our listserv (a pretty standard practice from what I have heard from other sites), as well as to now connect via Facebook and Twitter. I am not exactly sure how much/well this strategy is working, although I can get stats from FB on who has looked at and joined our fan page, which is an interesting set of weekly stats.

Of the events that we are planning, we do try to use technology as it seems appropriate. For instance, a few weeks ago, Erin led a book discussion on Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, and I was able to take notes on her computer as people shared their thoughts on the book and connections to their own teaching. Last week, Penny held her first Saturday seminar, and focused on digital storytelling. Over the course of the year, we hope to plan some other events that will engage our TCs and their colleagues in digital writing and distance learning, although we are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

What this reminds me of is the fact that we can create opportunities through technology that allow TCs to connect when and how they are able. I am not sure what we will do in particular related to webinars or synchronous online conversations (either through chat or voice). I want to offer our TCs the chance to reconnect in whatever ways we can, but not dilute the experience of being connected. So, we need to continue to think carefully about when, how, and why we offer online continuity events in conjunction with our face-to-face offerings such as our 100 days celebration and book clubs.

What’s Next…
So, as we continue to evolve as a digital writing project, I am honored and excited by the opportunities to talk with other NWP colleagues about what it is that we are doing and how they might work to integrate digital writing into their work. While I hesitate to offer advice because any type of work with writing and technology is highly contextual, I can summarize what I have learned (and continue to learn) in the following:

• Just like we expect teachers to write, we can expect them to use technology. While we neither want to or are able to expect that teachers will use digital writing tools all the time (for instance, I still take my notebook on writing marathons), it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that a teacher can bring his/her own laptop (or borrow one from school) when they come to writing project events. Put agendas up on a wiki or Google doc. Invite a backchannel conversations through TodaysMeet or other means. Ask people to compose digital texts. We know that this is important work, and we should expect our colleagues to come prepared to do it.
• When we make an expectation, we need to support it. Now that we expect teachers to come to the table with technology in hand, we need to offer them the time and support to learn how to use it. Create immersive experiences, yet continue to offer one-to-one support as teachers learn how to use it. Connect experiences that they know (writing on a word processor) with pedagogical practices (how to revise effectively) and then make the leap to a new technology (online word processors) and another pedagogy (offering comments and feedback). It’s that idea of facilitating learning through a “to, with, and by” model.
• Finally, make the experience meaningful. Don’t just have people create a profile on a wiki and never look at it. If you ask them to post it, then you need to encourage others to respond to it, and offer response yourself. It’s this old idea of a tree falling in a forest… if no one is there to see the wiki post, does it matter? Show your colleagues that their writing matters, and encourage revision and response, across time, space, and contexts.

So, those are some current thoughts about teaching and learning in a digital writing project. I hope that they help others writing project colleagues as they continue to think about what it means to integrate digital writing practices into both site work and their own teaching. I look forward to my conversations about this with colleagues this weekend, and in a few more weeks at the NWP annual meeting, and hope to hear ideas about how this work is happening for you, too.

In just a few weeks, Jossey-Bass will release the new book that Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and I wrote with the National Writing Project: Because Digital Writing Matters. Here is part of the official blurb about the book:

As many teachers know, students may be adept at text messaging and communicating online but do not know how to craft a basic essay. In the classroom, students are increasingly required to create web-based or multi-media productions that also include writing. Since writing in and for the online realm often defies standard writing conventions, this book defines digital writing and examines how best to integrate new technologies into writing instruction.

Over the past few weeks, a number of NWP folks have received copies of the book, and here are some of their reviews. If I have missed someone’s, please let me know:

Andrea Zellner’s Book Review

The authors address all of the issues that surround taking one’s students into online and digital environments.  They begin with a discussion defining the nature of this type of composition.  The text then moves into more prosaic concerns, those concerns that ultimately make or break the taking of instruction online or digital: issues of copyright, acceptable use policies, standards and benchmarks, assessment.  I was impressed that even the physical layout of a computer lab was considered: the very physical positioning of the students and teacher has an impact on the overall learning ecology.

Steven Moore’s “Guns, Germs, and… Digital Writing?”

Because Digital Writing Matters speaks to the important idea of balance in many ways; talking first about the value of using writing to organize ideas in new and useful ways and then about the significant role that tinkering with technology plays in learning. You can do too much of either and the communication event fails to have an effect. Too much technology and not enough methodology and the writer or writing teacher becomes encumbered like a soldier whose sword has a one ton hilt. It won’t matter how sharp the blade is if you can’t lift the weapon.

Kevin Hodgson’s Book Review — check out the link, because he has an embedded Glogster file there!

That aside, there are many things that stand out for me in this book (which is the companion to NWP’s Because Writing Matters, which laid out the rationale for writing as a means of learning across all curriculum). Among the points where I grabbed my highlighter and marked up the text (much to the surprise of my sons, who kept asking me why I was writing in a book):

• I like and think it is important that much of what we are calling writing falls under the term of “composition,” which involves using elements of words, audio, video, image and more to create a sense of meaning. That mixed-up, mashed-up element is highlighted throughout the book, as is the need to be able to teach those elements to our young writers/composers.
• The book highlights many NWP teachers in the classroom, showcasing a wide range of projects on various themes: engagement, assessment, curriculum alignment, etc. That is very helpful to have. I know a lot of the folks mentioned here, and admire their work immensely from afar. I like that they are being recognized, even though there are plenty more NWP folks doing amazing work, too.
• The chapter on the ecologies of digital writing was fascinating for me. I guess I hadn’t given this idea enough thought when it comes to the physical setting of a connected classroom. I have thought about the online environment, but pulling these two strands together (physical and virtual space) was an interesting turn.
• I appreciated the long list of “traits and actions” that are associated with digital writing because they highlight a vast array of elements of what is going on when young people compose with computers and devices. This list runs from creativity/originality to observations/inquiry to the remix culture. Plus, I am a sucker for lists.
• The sense of play is all over the stories in this book. We need time to play with technologies ourselves, and we need to give students the time to play and experiment, too. It’s hard to overstate this.
• The authors use the phrase “double helix” to describe the meshing (or not) of technology curriculum standards with writing standards. I love that phrase because it shows both the connections and the separate qualities of both.

Finally, there is Bud Hunt’s thoughtful photo composition: Lenses

Plus two more critical reviews, which I welcome, from reviews on Amazon.

This book makes it seem like digital writing is *special*, different than other writing; but we could say the same thing about writing on wax tablets, then parchment, then on paper, then on a typewriter… I don’t really believe the medium of Microsoft Word or Google Docs significantly impacts how we *think* about how we write. It possibly has more to do with the issue of *audience*, not medium — and in that case, a good “digital writing” book should make this more apparent from the first page. (Dame Droiture)

While this book covers the basic ways of communicating via e-mail, texting, and the way these ‘genres’ have influenced “standard” writing, it’s not a very creative way of addressing the problem. Cultural practice changes very fast, and digital cultural practice changes superfast, so I think it’s preferable that teachers do their own “cultural study” of digital writing and decide for themselves its significance and influence, or better yet, develop personal assignments figuring out ways to get students to meta-analyze the way they write depending on the medium and to whom their writing. (JackOfMostTrades)

So, that’s what people are saying. I look forward to continuing the conversation.



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Tomorrow, I will be presenting two sessions at the Sessions at Wisconsin State Reading Association Conference. Here are descriptions of the sessions and the related presentations:

From School to Screen: Why Digital Writing Matters (9:30 – 10:45)

Without question, writing continues to change in the twenty-first century. Teachers, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders value the teaching of writing — and see that our very notion of what it means to be literate is evolving –  yet continue to wonder how best to teach writing in a digital age. Based on work with the National Writing Project, we will discuss practices that hold promise as we develop understandings of what it means to write digitally, create spaces for digital writing in our schools, and extend assessment practices that account for the complexities of writing in a digital world.

Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop (1:30 – 3:30)

Digital writing tools such as blogs, wikis, digital stories, and social networks can contribute to what you are already doing in your writing instruction as well as appeal to a new generation of students. Building on the principles discussed in the first session, we will explore how new ways of thinking about well-established practices in the writing workshop—student choice and inquiry, conferring on writing, examining author’s craft, publishing writing, and broadening our understandings of assessment—could be updated for the digital age. With examples of how to teach digital writing throughout, this session will help you create your digital writing workshop. Join the Ning!

For both of these presentations, I want to acknowledge and thank my many colleagues from the National Writing Project with whom I have been able to collaborate in my research, teaching, and professional development work.

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As we prepare to head to the NWP Annual Meeting and NCTE Convention in just about a week, I am also plugging away at our Chippewa River Writing Project Continued Funding Application. I have come to one of the most compelling parts of the report, at least for me… the point where we reflect on the summer institute and think about what that means for our site. So, here is where I am at right now and, in the spirit of collaboration, I look for any insights that you might be able to offer me here as I try to articulate my vision of our “digital writing project.”

Thanks in advance for your feedback and I look forward to seeing many of you in Philly next week!
—
From the CRWP CFA — Troy’s Reflections on the Summer Institute:

Our summer institute, from its inception, focused on a clear integration of literacy and technology. In seeing ourselves as a “digital writing project,” we began our work with the intent that a “web 2.0” ethos of collaboration, creativity, and commitment would infuse our work. As we reflect on our experience as leaders in this first summer institute, and review the comments of TCs, we see that these elements were present. In terms of collaboration, we relied heavily on the wiki and Google Docs as spaces to share all of our work, from our initial writer’s profile to our responses to teaching demos to our own personal writing. Teachers began the institute with the expectation that they would, indeed, become part of a collaborative and connected group, largely enabled by the technologies that we chose.

In terms of creativity, we invited participants to engage in literacy and technology not just from a functional perspective (although, getting the technology to simply function was sometimes a problem!), but from critical and rhetorical perspectives as well. Our use of digital storytelling, for instance, highlights this perspective. While inviting participants to create their own digital stories, we also analyzed the stories that others had created to get a sense of what worked, what made the digital stories more than simply a collection of images set to a narration. By constantly moving back and forth from the technical to the critical and rhetorical aspects of composition – both analog and digital – we feel that participants were better able to articulate what was creative about their work, as well as why that approach worked.

Finally, we look at the commitment or level of engagement from participants. While we are happy to report that participants in our summer institute, like participants at countless other institutes, reported that their summer experience was, to use an oft-quoted phrase, “life changing,” we were also surprised to see the level at which they believed the digital aspects of our work influenced them. For instance, one participant may sum it up best by responding to the “most important thing” question from the final SI survey conducted by Inverness: 

The most important “thing” I gained is confidence with some interactive technology to implement in my classroom. I think implementation of the Wiki will benefit my students. Their mindset is that school work isn’t “real” work, and I’d like to change their mindset. Use of the Wiki will assist, I believe.

Simply stated, we “wikified” our teachers’ beliefs about what it means to be a writer and teacher of writing. Like Wikipedia, where many contributors create a collective whole that is, indeed, much more than the sum of its parts, we feel that our summer institute, with its focus on “collaboration, creativity, and commitment” allowed participants to see writing, and digital writing, in an entirely different perspective. We hope, like all NWP sites do, that this new vision will help inform the ways that they teach writing in their classrooms, especially in the ways that they integrate technology.

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This morning, we are in the middle of week two of our Chippewa River Writing Project summer institute, and the timing for writing this post couldn’t be better.

Yesterday, we went to the CMU library and our English reference librarian, Aparna Zambare, gave us an introduction to the library databases and Zotero. Minus a few technical glitches with getting Firefox installed, participants in the institute were immediately drawn in to Zotero, figuring out how to use it to cite materials from the library’s databases, link to books on Amazon, take snapshots of current web pages, and then tag and make notes on their items. As they begin to frame their teacher research projects, I felt that introducing Zotero as a bibliography management tool would provide them with a constant place to keep track of their sources and reflections on those sources. So far, it seems to have worked, with one participant commention about how he could see using this tool in his classroom next fall.

Then, this morning, we are being introdcued to the idea of creating a personal learning network by Sara Beauchamp, Technology Liaison from the Upper Peninsula Writing Project. She introduced us to the idea of the Networked Student, which led into a conversation amongst participants about how and why we might want to learn these tools for our own learning as well as for use in our classroom. She reminded us that using all of these tools can become overwhelming if we let them, and that they are messy when we begin using them. Yet, over time, you can learn to adapt some of the tools to make them useful to you.

She continued by sharing RSS in Plain English and Google Reader in Plain English. We then moved into the process of setting up their Google Readers. We are thinking about all of this in the context of teacher research projects, and Sara also framed the demo around some of the ideas in Christensen’s Disrupting Class. As the demo continued, participants set up their readers with feeds related to their personal interests and professional inquiry. We then had time to add feeds to our Reader and think about how to structure folders to that the information is organized.

Through both presentations, we came to think more about how information is accessed, shared, and integrated into our own research and learning. This is a good point for us to be at as we begin developing our teacher research projects and reach the mid point of our summer institute. More learning to come!

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In the few moments that I have before beginning the second day of the Chippewa River Writing Project summer institute, I wanted to pause to reflect on what happened in day one as it relates to digital writing. We were able to get up and running with very little trouble in way of having people use their own laptops, connecting to the network, navigating the wiki, and begin posting discussion items and making page changes.

As we continue on today, we are going to introduce Google Docs as a means for creating collaborative responses, begin looking at the tools for creating digital stories, and also continue use of the wiki for posting teaching demonstration materials and continuing with online discussions.

My overall impression of participants’ thoughts on all of this is that they are quite comfortable with the technologies, as we have introduced them slowly and purposefully. As we continue working with digital storytelling this week, I want to allow for plenty of play time that is framed by discussions about how and why we (and our students) should compose in digital environments. To me, the play time in these early stages is the most important part, so along with discussions about the writing process and writing pedagogy, I am hoping that people just feel the freedom to play and explore in this first week of the institute.

One thing that we have to figure out is how we plan to sustain our site’s work after the institute. I know that this is a topic of great consideration at many rural sites, and it will be no different here. I have been thinking about the affordances and constraints of setting up a Ning, a Facebook group, a Google group (list serv), or some combination of all of them. I don’t want to be spread across too many digital spaces, but I am not sure that our wiki will serve that purpose for keeping everyone connected in an immediate manner. There was talk of Twitter yesterday, too, but again I am not sure that is the best way for us to stay in touch as a local network. Any ideas are welcome!

Time to get moving into day two. My goal is to post more regularly as we move through the next four weeks, talking about the successes and surprises of working in a digital writing project.

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As the end of the semester approaches, the pace quickens for us as we plan for our inaugural summer institute at the Chippewa River Writing Project. In conversations that began many months ago and have stretched across talks with NWP folks like Will, Bud, Paul, Peter, and Sara, my thinking on what I want for a web presence for our site has been boiled down to the public face through our own website as well as a workspace for our teachers in this wiki. These conversations have now led me to a chat today with my writing group, Rob and Jim, both of whom are working with writing projects at their own universities.

The topic — what does it mean to have a “digital writing project?”

Now, I do not mean to be presumptuous here. There are plenty of writing projects who are doing digital writing in some way. And, many of them are doing outstanding work, leading the field of K-12 digital writing, as represented in the new collection – Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom (which we will likely use in our summer institute).

Our site can do something different, however, from the very first moment of our orientation that happens next month, through our summer institute, and into all the work of our site thereafter. We will be a digital writing project from the get go. We begin our work as a site with the expectation that digital writing is simply a part of our work. I am not sure how other sites that have begun in the past few years view their use of technology to support the site, represent their work, and connect their teachers, but I see our site as being a digital writing site because the use of blogs, wikis, collaborative word processors, digital stories, and other media will be a constant part of our work. From the initial Google form that teachers used to apply to their final digital portfolios this summer, digital writing will simply be a part of our site’s identity.

So, what does this look like for the writing project summer institute? Rob encouraged me to think about what I want participants to know and be able to do, and how those skills contribute to a deeper understanding of digital literacy. Here are some thoughts right now:

Personal writing
Participants will be invited and encouraged to share their alphabetic writing through a blog or wiki page, as well as by using collaborative word processors. In addition, as a component of personal writing in the summer institute, we will encourage them to create multimodal writing, most likely in the form of digital stories for this first summer. Through alphabetic and multimodal writing shared across digital spaces, participants will have a better understanding of how and why to choose different media for production of and response to writing.

Teaching demonstrations
Participants will again be invited and encouraged to share their teaching demonstrations on the CRWP wiki. We can show them how to upload and embed images, audio, slide shows, chat rooms, and other media, as well as how to use the discussion and history functions of the page to invite their peers into their presentation in ways otherwise not available without the technology present. This will, over time, create an archive of teaching demonstrations that will be both horizontally aligned by SI cohort and grade level within those cohorts as well as vertically from year to year, thus showing major themes in each summer’s institute. By inviting participants to create their teaching demo on a wiki page, we are creating an automatic archive that we can look to in the future for purposes of research, reflection, and professional development.

Reading research groups
In thinking about ways that we want participants to engage with one another and keep track of their own reading and research, there are a number of tools such as delicious, Diigo, and Zotero that I want them to be aware of and, ideally, use as research tools. As we engage in the process of reading, online and offline, and keeping track of that information by using digital writing tools, we will be teaching participants skills that they can use for their own professional learning as well as share with their students who are learning to become digital researchers themselves.

Writing response groups
As perhaps the key element of the summer institute, participants will share their writing in response groups. By using blogs, wikis, and collaborative word processors, we will be able to see the benefits and constraints of each tool including how they can be used in public and private ways. By inviting participants to think about what it means to respond in face to face and digital environments, we can compare the ways in which the context shapes our response process. Also, we can think about how offering comments through digital tools such as microphones or voice recorders can change the response process, too.

So, as I thought through all of these things, Rob and Jim asked me what this means for the culture of our site. This is bringing together my interests in digital literacy, teacher professional development, and the teaching of writing. So, of course, it leads me to a number of questions:

• How does an explicit focus on digital writing affect the experience of being in the summer institute?
• There is lots of research and writing done about relationships that individuals develop within institutes, but there is not as much about the vertical relationships that expand over time. How can being a digital writing project help these relationships materialize?
• We know that the NWP experience is powerful. What makes this such a powerful experience for teachers and how can we track it digitally? 
• How will a deeper understanding of how and why to use digital writing tools change participants’ perceptions of what they can and should do in their classroom?

Jim also suggested that participants create a literacy autobiography before the summer institute, but ask them to do so by creating it with a digital tool with which they are comfortable. This would help set the tone for the summer and provide us with an icebreaker activity in the first days when people share their autobiographies.

Of course, one of my jobs this summer will be to identify the two or three participants that can help do this kind of digital writing work next year and invite them to become leaders at our site.

What, then, am I going to do in a practical sense? Well, here are some thoughts right now:

• At the orientation, have participants sign up for Wikispaces and Gmail, doing demos of each with the expectation that they will use each for SI work
• Create a Google group that we will use for communication between the orientation and the summer institute and then beyond
• In the institute, explicitly introduce blogs, wikis, and collaborative word processors for a variety of purposes
• Also, in the institute, focus on digital storytelling early on so that participants can consider creating one for their final portfolio
• Introduce research tools such as social bookmarking and Zotero
• Require that participants create a digital portfolio for at least part of their final project

So, those are some initial thoughts. I will be curious to see how this develops and how teachers react to the overall experience of working in (and then reflecting on their work in) a digital writing project. I look foward to the journey. 

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