Turn "Ugh, we're writing AGAIN?" into "Yay! We're writing AGAIN!"

    We often think about older students when it comes to digital writing, but we cannot count out our younger students too. 
    In this age of technology, where kids are born knowing how to navigate a smartphone before they can walk, how do we meet our standards AND the ever-changing needs of our students? 
It’s simple, we use technology to meet them where they are and help them gain important skills about HOW to use the technology to make strong digital arguments and connections. 

    Students are constantly bombarded with ideas and information from a variety of sources. How do we teach our students to know how to separate fact from fiction? First, we must teach them to analyze a piece of text critically. We should, as educators, already be teaching our students how to analyze and think for themselves, but how do we do this with younger students?

    When beginning to teach the writing process, I like to have a mini-lesson beforehand about perspective. I use the story of The Three Little Pigs and compare it with The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.



Using this comparison helps students to understand how to recognize and analyze different perspectives, which is the first step in helping students craft their digital arguments. 

    In the book, Argument in the Real World: Teaching Adolescents to Read and Write Digital Texts, Turner and Hicks make the claim that "digital writing requires us to make intentional choices about what we want to say, as well as how we choose the media in which we say it." When we are teaching our students how to create digital arguments, we have to give both the procedural and declarative knowledge. (Turner and Hicks, 2017)

    According to Turner and Hicks, procedural knowledge is the "how?' of the digital writing process. Students must consider all forms of media in which they could relay their message and then, begin to craft their digital take. The declarative knowledge is the "what?" of the digital writing process. This is the actual crafting of the digital argument. Students find information to corroborate their specific claim to strengthen their argument. This can only be done through information analysis. 

    Finally, we must begin to have students put the "digital" pen to paper. We can use a variety of apps, such as Elementari or Night ZooKeeper (Common Sense Education, 2022) to keep the digital writing process fun, interesting, and creative. 
    We must also explain that creating a digital argument takes time and that new information can always be found and added. That's the great thing about the internet, we are constantly sharing new ideas and information! 



Resources

Turner, K. H., & Hicks, T. (2017). The Nature of Argument in a Digital World. In Argument in the real world: Teaching adolescents to read and write digital texts. essay, Heinemann.

Common Sense Education. (n.d.). Elementary School writing apps and websites. Common Sense Education. Retrieved October 9, 2022, from https://www.commonsense.org/education/top-picks/elementary-school-writing-apps-and-websites


 

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 11, 2022 at 10:52 AM

    Jennifer - great job on this post! As a secondary ELA teacher, it is really helpful to me to see where these critical thinking skills are developed on the elementary and middle grade level. It was also helpful to see some of the apps you use to aid digital writing on that level. I'm curious as to how teachers at this level integrate issues of citation and plagiarism - or if that's even necessary in the early stages of writing and critical analysis? Turner and Hicks (2017) emphasized that "learning to curate sources so that they can locate information later is fundamental to growth as a reader and writer" (p. 76). This is what, in my opinion, should be focused on at the elementary level. When looking for scholarly articles about this topic, I was interested to see that in 1993 Lamb, et al. wrote about "Research Skills for Gifted Elementary School Pupils." Although these writers bring up some interesting points, I believe that more current pedagogy would point to the necessity for research skills for all levels of students.

    References
    Lamb, P., Kennedy, D., Chezem, J., Hopf, S., & Vaughn, V. (1993). Research skills for gifted Elementary School Pupils. Gifted Child Today Magazine, 16(4), 2–7. https://doi.org/10.1177/107621759301600401
    Turner, K. H., & Hicks, T. (2017). Argument in the real world: Teaching adolescents to read and write digital texts. Heinemann.


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