In an effort to continue building bridges and collaborating efforts between K-12 and higher education, this blog carnival seeks to open conversations about the ways digital writing is taught, encouraged, and facilitated in K-12 classrooms. Stemming from conversations taking place at the 4T Virtual Conference on Digital Writing, in addition to ongoing research conducted through the Michigan Teachers as Researchers Collaborative (MiTRC), we invite short reviews, commentaries, lessons, and examples illustrating the ways digital writing plays a role in K-12 instruction. For the purposes of this blog carnival, we use the term “digital writing” to mean any activities, lessons, and exercises that encourage students to use a broad range of resources to compose across genres and media (Hicks, 2013). This includes (but is not limited to) composing digital presentations, web texts, social media posts, video, or working in online environments. We are interested in how teachers and students interact with digital technologies to learn, share, and make knowledge together.
Topics discussed in these pieces may include:
- How digital writing encourages engagement in English Language Arts and other content areas
- Connections between digital writing tools such as blogs or Google Docs and formative assessment as well as students’ feedback practices
- The ways that digital writing is taught in schools, colleges, workplaces, and communities
- How digital writing affects students’ understanding of audience and purpose, as well as their own writerly identity
- How digital writing alters, illuminates, or deepens the writing process for students
- Opportunities for writing digital texts that are expanding traditional notions of academic writing beyond argumentative essays, research papers, and other “school” genres
If you’re interested in contributing to this blog carnival, please send a short (100 word or less) proposal for your post to drcfellows@umich.edu. We will be accepting and publishing posts throughout September, October, and November 2015, so please send your descriptions as soon as possible but no later than October 31st, 2015. Full blog posts will be due approximately two weeks after your 100 word proposal is accepted.
For more information, please contact: the Sweetland DRC fellows (drcfellows@umich.edu) or Oakland Schools Literacy Consultant Delia DeCourcy (Delia.DeCourcy@oakland.k12.mi.us).
