Raising Readers and Writers

I am taking a class at OSU this week called Digital Multimodal Composition with Dr. George Newell, another co-director of the Columbus Area Writing Project. When my daughter asked me what multimodal meant, I gave her a fuzzy answer because I wan’t too sure myself. I’ve come to learn that it is a way of showing meaning that includes text, sound (voice and/or music), and visuals (photos, moving pictures, color, etc.). Our assignment is to do a digital response to a poem and then create a digital memoir piece using Photo Story. I used the poem “I am Learning to Speak English” by J. Patrick Lewis for my digital response and wrote a memoir piece about a week I spent with my grandma the summer of 2004 (about 3 months before she died).

The process that we have gone through has been eye-opening! Each morning, George asks us to write in our learning logs about how our thinking. One of the things we’ve talked about is how our own view of responding to a piece of literature has changed as we go through the process of creating a multimodal piece. There is so much to think about and most of us in the class have gone through the same journey…first being very literal as we found images to represent the piece of writing to becoming more thoughtful and looked at the writing in a more abstract way. Even choosing the music has brought about a myriad of thinking. One man put it beautifully today when he said, “I’ve asked myself if I am illustrating, responding to or reacting to this poem as I’ve been creating my project.”

We all agree that the end product does not show all the thinking and purposeful decisions that go into the final project. I think that tells us something as teachers. First, our students need time to work through the process, make mistakes, and change their minds. I also think that asking students to write about and engage in conversations that describe their process is important. A simple rubric for the final project does not do justice to the student’s work.

These projects have certainly given me a broader view of using technology in the classroom. I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with the teacher group who is reading The Digital Writing Workshop this summer. I also can’t wait to try some of these ideas in my classroom!