Digital Writing is about...

exploring authentic ideas, connecting thoughts, posing big and small questions, and capturing moments in time.  It's about writing to learn and learning to write so others can understand.  It is writing that is meant to be read.

This is an invitation for you to join our sandbox and play with some ideas that may be a new twist.

(*Note: This content supports our learning series on Digital Writing Workshop.)

Diving In:

Real writing comes from deep within.  One principle as noted by Troy Hicks in The Digital Writing Workshop is student choice in topics and genres, and authentic inquiry.  It is rather difficult to face a blank page and expect great writing to appear. 

Let's start with gathering ideas -

• Listing your Writing Territories
• Touchstone texts to use 

From Ideas to Drafting: 

• Personal Narrative  (opportunity for successful dive-in).  (*You can use the content as a word cloud using Wordle or Tagxedo.  See also Tools page.)   
  

Conferring:

These are conversations between teacher/student or student/student with a focus on understanding, expanding, deepening and reframing thoughts.  Most people are familiar with the writing conference between teacher and student. Conversations using a wiki is extremely simple as it can be done online at any time.  You can add colour coding to your comments or insert the performance standard rubrics.  Consider inviting the student as a partner in the conversation - wikis can offer that 'back-and-forth' environment.  Every edit/change event is tagged with a date stamp so you can compare versions, return to previous versions and have a running record of the progress of the writer (see Page history link in upper right).  (*Note: I've always found the amount of work in handwriting my comments on each student's piece the most time consuming.  Moving to a digital writing platform has dramatically reduced the time.)  When conversations are during class, a tracking sheet is great to keep all the notes.  If you have more than one class, you may consider having different coloured sheets for each class.  Feel free to edit the sheet to fit your purposes.

• Reading/responding/talking/collaborating about student writing
  

If you are interested in getting a digital copy (msword) of the BC performance standards (informal writing in kid language), please email me.

Strategies that Lift the Level of Writing:

•  Adding Details
  
• Using "Plan Boxes"
  
• "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out" (a digital camera adventure)
  

• Nudging Writers 
  

Composing in the Multimedia World:

The world of the student is in multimedia.  In fact, more than any other time period, students are writing and publishing on their own.   Using tools or applications such as digital cameras, video, voicethread, podcasts, or screencasts can enhance and connect the story to produce a richer experience.  These forms of differentiation offer dynamic entry points for every student giving them greater success in the process.  Start the journey simply by having students add images to their writing.  Choosing images (drawn, photos, clipart, or uploaded through internet searches) that support the message and even strategically inserting them on the wiki page is challenging.  Or maybe the wiki page is used to script out a photostory to describe an event, a process, a problem-solving scenario. This not only relies on clear writing but also requires organization of thought. (For more information on these, please go back to the frontpage of digisandbox.)  

Keeping Track:

Staying true to our original intent means that students will enter into the process at varying levels of skill. There are simple ways to keep track of where students are in the writing process.  These can include a mix of online and offline tools and strategies.  The advantage of online tools are that they can be accessed anytime, anywhere.  I've used Wallwisher as a Temperature Check - please play in it by adding your own notes.  Where conversations (conferring) and minilessons are the shape of the day, there's nothing like a good clipboard and tracking sheet  or post-it notes.

Creating Interactive Intrigue

Why do you think "Create Your Own Adventures" books are so popular?  Perhaps it's the control that readers have over some parts of the plot  and characters.  Each reading produces a different outcome. Perhaps it's the idea that writers can infuse time warps or produce works that interact with their intended readers, making a more personal connection. Wikis can easily make this process happen. 

Rather than talk about it, let's show you how this works.   (*Note: This idea came from Kevin Hodgson via a post at Two Writing Teachers blog.)

Click on the image to start the adventure.