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Education and Urban Society July 15, 2013

Reading Between The Pictures

Teaching English Learners Building on Cultural and Linguistic Strengths (July 22, 2013)

**Pages 1-60 Crafting Digital Writing**
** We have been learning about the digital natives that we currently teach and how they are wired to think and create differently. The book begins with a great point that "just because they can post status updates quicker than most of us adults can pull out our phones" they may not always be "intentional" about it. So as teachers it is our job to teach them to be "intentional about the craft of digital writing to help them realize their potential in academic social, political and community contexts." P.19 We will be guiding the students to be purposeful about their digital publications. The book discusses that fact that just being a digital native isn't enough. **

**Digital writing is a lot more convenient for editing and for organizing thoughts and resources. I love that the book gives several examples of websites and tools that we can use with our students to be able to use mind-maps, and citation managers. This is a great resource for our project in class and also for our use in our own classrooms. **

**The text discusses Hackasaurus which teaches students to "hack" current websites. This ties back to our reading about digital remixing. This website gives students an opportunity to play with these websites and reshape and remix them into something that they like. In turn, allowing students to become active producers. (p. 41) **

**This text is very user friendly and provides nice examples of how students have produced these works of digital writing. I like how students can create links and add images into their texts to provide a more in depth explanation of their writing. It is important to remember that the links be purposeful and not just thrown in without a cause. **

**The wiki format lets students take "an active role in composing while teaching them to work together to compose, revise, and edit an end product." (58) ** **We had a guest speaker come in and share how her class collaborated with another class to create poetry using technology and I think using a wiki to do this would work out really well. **

**P.60-123 (Crafting Digital Writing) **

** I enjoyed reading the chapter about crafting digital presentations. The author mentioned that it has become a monotonous task to assign students to a boring presentation to share with their classmates. This chapter really gave a lot of pointers for really teaching students the "craft" of presenting. On page 62 there is somewhat of a checklist for what makes an effective presentation, this would be a great checklist to give students when editing their presentations. One of the most important ideas I think is to encourage students to become storytellers during presentations. I agree that we need to encourage students to be more creative and use less pre made templates. "Even though we often preach a certain organizational style, aren't we amazed and delighted when a student provides something unique and creative?"(p.63) They also mention to avoid the bullet point plague, so I wondered what these authors might think of some of my presentations? I have used Prezi in my classroom before for the end of the year [|North Carolina ABC Books] and I wished that I would have read this chapter in advance. My style was more of a allow students to play with it and be creative philosophy, and I thought they turned out good, but having this text as resource would have been helpful. **

**When it comes to digital and audio texts I am less comfortable and have not had any experience using them in my classroom. One reason I believe is the tools that I would need to do this type of activity. I find it interesting that when all the technical details are addressed it still comes down to the way in which the students can present and tell their story. Adding the digital piece just makes it more visually enhancing. Page 114 has a great overview for the writing process when composing digital video texts. On page 116 there is a suggestion to use the story boarding chart on [|readwritethink.org] so students can plot out their characters, action, setting, camera position, sounds effects or background music. This book discussed that a lot of images are free for students to use which ties in with that idea of digital remixing. Students are searching on the web to create a collection of others work to achieve their purpose in their writing.**