Recording of “Exploring the Craft of Digital Writing, Grades 2–8”

Enjoy this archived recording of “Exploring the Craft of Digital Writing, Grades 2–8” with Dr. Troy Hicks and the Center for the Collaborative Classroom.

More and more, our students encounter a daily dose of digital texts, ranging from websites to social-media messages, from class assignments to YouTube videos. As they encounter these texts, what are the strategies that they need to be close, critical readers and viewers? Moreover, as students craft their own digital writing, what do they need to be able to do as writers, producers, and designers?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0SFvy5B9s?rel=0]

Resources from the Session

Additional Resources


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Wisconsin Education Chat – 1-23-18

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Tomorrow night — Tuesday, January 23rd from 8:00 to 9:00 CST — I will be facilitating the #WisEduChat with a focus on “Teaching Digital Writing.” Here are the questions we will explore over the hour:

  • Q1: Thinking about writing instruction in your classroom, what’s going well? What’s puzzling you? What do you want to try?
  • Q2: Now, let’s talk about digital writing. How would you define it? How does it compare to typical “schoolish” kinds of writing?
  • Q3: How does digital writing change our work with students?
    What changes with our curriculum, instruction, and assessment?
  • Q4: When assessing digital writing, what are we looking at? Process? Product? Quality of writing? Quality of digital workmanship?
  • Q5: What are some of the digital writing tools that you are using…
    or that you want to try?
  • Q6: What specific assignment ideas do you have in mind? What genres, audiences, and purposes (as well as tools) might you explore?

Also, I’m pleased to note that I will be in Wisconsin at least twice in the year ahead. This conversation via Twitter will be a good one to get things started!

  • Wisconsin Literacy Research Symposium in Appleton, WI, June 21-22, 2018
  • NWP Midwest Conference in Madison, WI, August 3-5, 2018

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Reflections on Participating in KQED’s “Finding and Evaluating Information”

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Over the holiday break, I’ve participated in an open course for educators, “Finding & Evaluating Information,” sponsored by KQED. Though the course ended last week, many of the materials are still available online, including this GDoc that contains a list “greatest hits” (and resources) from all the participants.

Among the many lessons posted by other participants, I created my own, Ethical Photo Editing (Personal, Professional, and Journalistic) that is designed to help students understand the decision making they would need to make when representing images through digital media, depending on the context. Also, one of the participants pointed me to an article by Poynter, “Three ways to spot if an image has been manipulated,” which I found quite useful.

Another one of the activities, adapted from the New York Times Learning Network’s “Media Literacy Student Challenge | Explore Your Relationship With News,” asks you to

Do a personal 24- to 48-hour news audit in which you record all the news you get now, where it comes from, and how well it meets your needs and interests.

This short course reminded me of the power of experiential, inquiry-based learning. As I am redesigning a media literacy course for teacher candidates, I am thinking that one of these types of brief activities each week could be incredibly useful, so I will return to them again in the future.


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