This fall, in collaboration with 4T Virtual Conference in Digital Writing and the Michigan Teachers as Researchers Collaborative, we hosted a blog carnival that worked toward building bridges between the K-12 classroom and higher education. Below you’ll find a roundup of posts in this series. We invite you to view these posts as part of a conversations that will continue beyond the boundaries of the carnival.
Kicking off the carnival was a collaborative post written by former DRC Graduate Fellow Laura Gonzales and Oak Park High School educators Peter Haun, Katie Locano, and Sarah Weaver. In their post, “Digital Writing does not Begin with “the Digital”: Building Cultures of Feedback to Support Effective Writing and Revision,” the authors explore strategies they developed, based on their research at suburban Detroit school where they teach, to make peer feedback more productive and fruitful.
Derek Miller, an English teacher at Royal Oak High School, offers a reflection on integrating digital writing into his classroom in his post, “Digital Natives are Human, too“. Miller quips, “fiasco and failure were among two the f-words to describe” what happened when his first lesson didn’t go as expected, and offers how he revised the lesson to more successfully achieve the learning outcomes he’d created for his students.
Richard Kreinbring writes about classroom blogging in his post “Enter the Blog“. Kreinbring explains how blogging “scrambles the usual teaching formula,” and how this scrambling makes it a fruitful medium for teaching writing and audience.
Exploring another composing genre, Kevin Hodgson writes about webcomics in “Why Webcomics Matter (and how they Push Literacies)“.
Charles Grimm discusses online writing tutoring in “Writing as Process: Synchronous and Asynchronous Feedback in Remote Tutoring” Grimm observes the ways his students collaborate and compose differently in brick and mortar spaces and online, and he argues that “online spaces like Google Drive allow a unique view of writing as process and offers up a useful alternative method to evaluate or assess student writing.”
Wrapping up the carnival is Wesley Johnson’s post “Padlet, Digital Writing, and Pedagogies of Fear” Johnson discusses his use of Padlet, a click and edit LMS and digital writing platform, with his AP Literature students, and a culture of fear of technology in K-12 classrooms. Of the many insights he offers, he observes instructors often fear that using digital technologies in the classroom will reduce rigor, and that “fear prevents educators from spending the necessary time to craft engaging pedagogies that use the technologies of students but that also allow us to mold students into thoughtful writers and consumers.”
In addition to the blog carnival posts, we invited folks to join us for two conversations. The first was an interview with Delia DeCourcy on the 4T Virtual Conference on Digital Writing. The second was our Twitter chat on digital writing in the K-12 classroom.
We see these posts as the continuation of a larger conversation, and we invite you to engage with them in the comments. You can also find us on Twitter and on Facebook.
