What I learned about Digital Writing

 I enjoyed reading Troy Hicks “The Digital Writing Workshop,” as he offered many practical strategies and examples. Some of the biggest “aha’s” I got from this book are: allowing student choice, encouraging active revision, studying author’s craft, and broadening our understandings of assessment. In my literature circle, we discussed how blogs can be used effectively in the classroom. One of the things we came up with, is that students would be able to virtually respond to other writers. This would help the author by allowing him or her take that feedback, and use it for a future post or to make revisions. Another benefit of using blogs inside the classroom, is that students can create a searchable archive of posts. This way, students will always have access to the work they’ve done, conveniently located in one [digital] space.

 Hicks recommended setting up student blogs through a free service such as Edublogs, or Class Blogmeister, then secondly, integrating a social network with built-in blogging such as Ning.  From a teacher’s standpoint, blogs are a great way to also get students to thinking on higher levels by analyzing, synthesizing, and reflecting on information over time. Hick’s notes, “…the goal is for students to create their own blogs and connect their ideas to those of their peers.” I think this is a powerful quote, because it shows some of the most important things to adolescents: 1) being able to communicate digitally, 2) receiving feedback from their peers (what does “so and so” think about my post?) Through blogging, teachers and students can advance both the teaching and learning of writing.