Education Week: Language Arts Educators Balance Text-Only Tactics With Multimedia Skills - 1 views
-
“We need to help students think about how as writers they are making good, responsible, thoughtful choices about the ways they represent themselves, other people, topics, and issues,” he said. Mr. Hicks recommends digital storytelling for students, which allows them to create three- to five-minute videos with their own narration. They can embed sound effects, music, and special transition effects between each frame, he says.
-
to assess what students are doing and creating, he says, students can use Jing—a Web-based screencasting tool—to make presentations that explain how they crafted their digital stories.
-
“With digital writing, I agree that we need to move beyond the ‘wow’ factor. Yet I think that there are times where students can compose and collaborate on digital texts in ways that they couldn’t have possibly imagined with simply having pencil and paper,” he said.
- ...8 more annotations...
-
“Digital writing, like all kinds of writing, requires teachers to create authentic assignments, share good mentor texts, model the process of composing a digital text, confer with students, invite them to confer with one another, and assess the writing as both a process and a product,”
-
“We do a lot of writing,” she said. “Probably more writing than they’ve done in school before. And most of that writing is published on the Web. That’s really the crux of it.”
-
“Every one of my kids is a publisher,” he said.
-
In his Cyber English class, every student spends most of the class period writing on a computer, Mr. Nellen says. He is able to check on students’ progress by viewing each student’s computer screen through his own.
-
In addition, she says, her district often blocks digital tools that she would like to use. For the class project with Ning, for instance, Ms. Funk had to appeal to the district to first unblock the site.
-
“When [student] writing becomes public, it ceases to be this assignment they just hand in for the teacher,” Ms. Hogue said. “At some point, the shift happens in their minds that anybody could be reading this, and it really needs to look good.”
-
“We’re learning alongside students,” she said, “and that changes some of the dynamics in the classroom.”
-
Having a constricted curriculum can also make it difficult for teachers to find the time to incorporate new methods and innovative technologies, Ms. Kajder says.
