Digital+Writing+Workshop+Response

by Troy Hicks
For the purposes of this review, I am going to focus mostly on chapter 4 from this text. It is the chapter I used extensively for my research project, and therefore the one with which I am most familiar. Chapter 4 was on “Examining Author’s Craft Through Multimedia Composition.” Being most familiar with this medium of composition myself, I thought it would be an interesting way to get the students on board and willing to write. I also hoped that the pull of working with laptops would motivate them to work on the pieces of the project I would require beforehand.

I used this project with my remedial class to try and merge the reading and writing processes, two activities they let it be known every single day were two of their least favorite tasks. They’d do anything to get out of reading and writing no matter what the length or difficulty or involvement of the particular task. If we were focusing on reading one day, they insisted they’d rather write. On another day when our major project involved writing, they would insist that reading was a better activity. Creating digital stories seemed like a nice way to let them “play” on computers, watch a lot of videos to prepare, and use comparatively little actual writing on paper to create a beautiful piece of work. I assumed I could still teach the regular writing principles, just in a modified way, such as Troy suggests on page 53: “...take the principles of craft that we use when creating print texts, such as leads and conclusions, but focus on multimedia composition.”

Although I didn’t run a true writer’s workshop in my remedial class, I was working hard on implementing as many of the core principles of a writing workshop as I could, as Troy states on page 1. Student choice was my number one principle. In this case, when I required a specific genre, I at least tried to give my students the choice of the topic. I used writing prompts, mini lessons, and author’s craft demonstrations repeatedly to show a variety of digital stories and analyze the writing and the processes that created them, in hopes that each student could find at least one idea that fueled their motivation. I offered possibilities for outside publication, but since my students were reluctant readers and writers, nothing about that prospect appealed to them in any way, except in some cases the thought of showing the video to the family members or friends highlighted in the story. Another problem with having such reluctant students was the inability to grade much more than the final project. Without the threat of a failing grade for not completing the video, it was very difficult to motivate the students to do any writing, so ultimately I had to enforce grading the finished project a lot more than the process of working on it.

The students who also attended my regular education classrooms were already familiar with the concept of MAPS (pp. 57-58). We had discussed their purpose and used them in nearly every piece of writing in the classroom so far during the year. I did not completely re-teach the concept for the students who did not have me in regular ELA, but gave the entire class a brief overview of the MAPS concept and then followed through by asking the students to keep just two pieces in mind: the Audience and the Purpose of the video. The media and the mode were already chosen by me, and the situation was pretty similar for each student, so we did not focus on those, although in other situations I do find these pieces of the process to be very important.

Combining the advice on page 59 with some information I found online, the piece of advice I kept repeating to my students was this: “Always keep the goal of your digital story in mind. EVERY decision you make should lead to that goal.” They tired of hearing it, but I think for those who finished their stories it made the entire process more memorable and the final product more cherished, because they kept their audiences in mind throughout the entire process and were eager to share the stories with them when they finished.

The integration of so many elements of technology is my favorite part of creating a digital story. I have always been a person who sees connections in the world, and I love to share such insights with my students. I also love the way digital stories put together simple creations (a picture slideshow, a favorite song, a few words of text, etc.) in such a way as to create an entirely new product. Students love working with the technology and playing around with fun features like transitions and special effects, so that when they finally see their end results, even they are often amazed at what they’ve created. No matter the struggle to get there, no matter the issues with technology along the way or the “getting it just right” hurdles overcome, no student can resist a smile at the quality of writing they produce. And when they hound me for days to get them a copy on a DVD that they can take home to share, these students who don’t read for fun, and who barely write even for a grade, who are reluctant students in almost every way, can finally take home something to be proud of.