Chapter 5: Designing and Publishing Digital Writing

Chapter Summary:

     Digital writing presents many opportunities and challenges for students and teachers.  Students feel more engaged in the writing process because they are posting, writing and commenting on the writing of others.  By sharing and reading others writings they gather ideas to craft their writing better.  When commenting on others writing students will learn what works and doesn’t work for others and for themselves.  When writing peer responses students may have a hard time in fully engaging in their response because they are distracted by publishing their own work.  E-Anthology has developed a simple kind of peer response, readers are asked to “bless”, “address” or “press” their work (p. 83).  You can ask your peers to bless your work, if you feel that your piece is very personal or you do not want to be critiqued heavily you can ask your readers to simply offer praise.  If you ask your readers to address your work, you want the reader to respond to character development or the flow then you ask your reader to address the work.  If you ask your readers to press your work then you want your reader to critique your work to help you move forward as a writer. You can have your students create a digital portfolio you can have your students use their blog, wikis or an audio anthology.

Making Connections:    

     I really liked the information on the E-Anthology.  I find it very helpful to have different ways to ask peers to edit a student’s work.  I think that is something that could be translated into the classroom even with traditional writing workshops.  I also liked that the directions that were included in the text on how to create portfolios in each of the mediums.  Sometimes it is nice to have someone walk you through how to make something happen instead of just talking at you about it. This also can help teachers with explicit instruction when it comes time to publish and share student work.

Classroom Implications:

     Schools could incorporate a digital writing portfolio into their curriculum as a high school portfolio where students create a four year portfolio of their works.  Each student could be given their own blog or wiki space with privacy settings set so they were not made public but could be shared.  This way they would have a place to put all their work they would want in their senior portfolio.  This portfolio could be a graded assignment in their senior year.