Currently Reading: Crafting Digital Writing

Troy Hicks offers teachers a guide to taking student writing from paper to screen and creating activities that engage students and inspire them to produce their best compositional work. In his first book, The Digital Writing Workshop, Hicks shows teachers simple steps for connecting the writer's workshop elements we know and love to digital tools that can streamline workshop activities and connect students to digital tools of their time. In Crafting Digital Writing, Hicks dives in a little deeper by focusing on how to guide students to examine the craft of web-text and multimedia compositions. Students are then poised to create their own compositions that not only satisfy the writing skills required by adopted standards, but, even better, motivate students to draft, revise, and publish high quality original works that can be presented to a genuine  global audience.

Currently Reading: Teaching Digital Natives

I am currently reading Marc Prensky's book Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning.  I read a chapter free from Prensky's website as part of a class assignment this semester, and I was so inspired by his idea of partnering with students to foster learning that I decided to purchase and read the whole book.

Some of Prensky's ideas that speak to me include connecting relevance and interest to classroom learning, and creating a learning partnership between students and teachers. Technology, he argues, is available to facilitate this kind of innovative classroom focus, and teachers do not need to be tech experts in the partnership.  Instead they need to be open to new ways of thinking, including sharing control of expertise and learning with students.

Update:  Read my thoughts on Teaching Digital Natives and classroom application here.