The wide-ranging and ever-expanding presence of technology tools entering our classrooms brings a multitude of potential opportunities for innovative new projects. Multimodal composition comes to life through student created digital stories, podcasts, websites, and large-scale projects that include all of the above. In many ways, digital projects pose the same challenges to traditional forms of assessment as familiar examples of low-tech projects. Similar to project-based learning, digital projects raise questions about contribution and collaboration, the process of documenting problem solving, and determining exactly what constitutes evidence of craft.

Teachers will also likely encounter the age-old composition struggle of balancing process and product, to weigh creativity and originality alongside the standards of conventions. However, I would argue that the challenge of assessment is even more pronounced for digital stories because of the added complexities of working with technology tools–a task that is often new for both teachers and students alike. Prior experience and exposure can play heavily on a student’s ability to successfully produce a high quality digital project, though even the most tech-savvy can fall victim to the unlucky technical glitch or misstep that can cause serious setbacks to the progress of the project.

How do you account for these considerations in your grading rubric? And, what characteristics or skills does your rubric actually even assess? These are always tough questions, only made harder with digital projects. We recently explored these questions in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s ELA methods course I taught last year to preservice elementary teachers. While inevitably each teacher will come to his/her own interpretation of what assessment looks like, the following references might provide helpful starting points to begin the conversation. By no means an exhaustive list, these are practitioner-friendly tools to help us all inquire into what matters and why in crafting assessments of digital projects.

National Writing Project, Digital Is, Multimodal Assessment Tool
The starting point really began for us when we came across the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site that houses the NWP Multimodal Assessment Project. One of the most interesting features of this project is how the process is documented–helping new and veteran teachers alike dive into the complexities related to crafting a multimodal assessment rubric. This was particularly enlightening for my preservice teachers, as it noted the limitations of using the widely accepted 6+1 Traits rubric for these new types of digital projects. The latest project draft presented highlights five elements of multimodal composition that teachers might use to guide and formulate assessment tools: context, artifact, substance, process management and technical skills, and habits of mind.

Troy Hicks, Crafting Digital Writing & Assessing Digital Writing
The straightforward examples and discussions of the digital writing process in Hick’s book were helpful and practical for our classroom discussion and application. While providing examples and analysis of teacher-created projects, Hicks draws attention to the intentionality of the process as a whole: teacher intentionality in designing the assignment, student intentionality throughout the production process, and the degree to which assessment is intentionally authentic in nature. Intentionality is highlighted through his application of author’s craft to digital writing using MMAPS (p. 20-21): mode, media, audience, purpose, situation for the writer, and situation of the writing (for a deeper discussion of this very helpful heuristic see the Digital Writing Workshop pp. 56-59). These characteristics are equally useful for designing an assessment that is responsive and attentive to the goals of the project. In addition, students were particularly drawn to the discussion of “Habits of Mind” which mirrored many of the less quantifiable but highly valued goals in their perspective: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, metacognition (p. 26).

His follow-up book, Assessing Digital Writing, goes one step further to provide a collaborative protocol for looking closely at student writing. While not providing any easy answers, the perspectives offered highlight the ways in which craft is similar and different in digital contexts and how this impacts the assessment process.

Formative Tools
Once the purpose and goals for a project are clearly established and a rubric has been created (or co-created with students), the role of formative assessment and feedback is just as much if not more so important when implementing digital projects. These projects can often feel “fuzzy” and uncertain as you move forward the first few times. I have often found that keeping the limits “open” and encouraging my students to take risks requires me to have less control and clarity over how I envision the final product. For me this choice feels empowering for my students, however, they don’t always interpret the responsibility of the unknown in the same way. Instead, many students have encountered anxiety and confusion over not quite understanding “what” exactly they were producing (even as I reassuringly supported them in embracing the freedom of the opportunity).

Later on, I often found this anxiety becoming my own as I struggled to assess the work of: the student who produced the bare minimum and used no feedback to make improvements; the student who had ambitious ideas but failed to pull it together; the student who crashed her computer and lost everything to start anew the night before and submit something less than her best but the best she could manage. Of course these examples are no different from the assessment challenges of traditional writing assignments; they only become much more widespread and amplified when new technology tools are added to the mix. The addition of carefully designed formative and informal assessments, however, aided in my analysis of the project and student work, helping to validate the meaningfulness of the assignment through the insights and skills students were developing-even when their final pieces were not necessarily successful in terms of traditional rubric categories.
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Some strategies I’ve employed include:

• Design journals: having students write about, discuss, and document decisions and ongoing work related to their projects. These are especially helpful to understand why students made particular decisions, which can later be compared to post-product assessments of how well these decisions actually worked in contributing to the overall project goals.
• Storyboards/outlines: these documents help to organize student ideas and also call attention to the various demands of the mode and media that students should attend to. For example, even before students have found the right music to set to a scene in their podcast, it is helpful to see that they have considered the mood of a segment of narration in terms of the music they plan to use. For assessment purposes, they allow you to quickly confer with students and determine who is ready to begin working with the technology tools, and who might benefit from extended conferencing to work through the concept.
• Digital Writing conferences: Similar to traditional writing conferences, these informal checks are essential to understanding how students are progressing through the project, determining what “trouble areas” might be arising that would benefit from mini-lessons, and helping students to receive workshop feedback prior to publishing their final drafts. An added element to balance is the type of feedback being requested and given: related to the technology or the project concept. Oftentimes, students can get hung up on technical questions related to using the tool, overlooking perhaps more important questions related to the project goals. Addressing both needs, through informal or informal conferences, can help the production process to stay focused.

Taken together, these formative measures can provide great insight to use alongside final products in assessing what exactly students have learned or are able to do as a result of working through the process of digital construction.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the fabulous Dawnene Hassett to teach a version of the multiliteracies unit I designed previously for my Teaching ELA course. This unit—as scary and overwhelming as it originally felt—has turned out to be one of the most impactful instructional designs I’ve undertaken. Its legs have carried it to professional conferences (WEMTA and WCTE), a professional learning day at a local school district, and as various workshops in other university courses on campus. The basic gist of the project is to engage preservice teachers with multimodal composition by posing open-ended opportunities for them to design digital projects in response to choice reading.

The original version includes the design of four projects (a traditional essay, infographic, podcast, and digital story) which expose teachers to the varied nature of the writing process within each of those contexts. We use the work of Troy Hicks (Crafting Digital Writing and Assessing Digital Writing) to guide how we attend to author’s craft, elements of multimodality, and the intentionality of our design choices. While students often begin from a place of frustration and confusion, because it turns out they are NOT digital natives afterall, they ultimately find themselves impressed and excited by their final products. And the “stickiness” of the experience has been vital to encouraging transfer to practice, something that can be especially challenging with digital projects.

This time around I decided to follow-up on a recent inclination to think more strategically about how to write about writing. While this piece is usually something I have addressed only through conversation, I’ve begun to think that articulating these perspectives is an essential piece of synthesizing the varied knowledge and practices informing each individual’s writing process and as a culminating reflection that ties the experience together in a way that may aid in transferring the process to practice. Afterall, while I jump for joy to see student teachers even attempting these types of digital projects at their sites, I am more interested in the ways they scaffold and bring awareness to the thinking that goes into the production process.
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Enter the Author’s Statement. Borrowed from the popular usage of artist statements, I envisioned this as a complementary reflection that would illuminate the experience of production and intentionality behind each writer’s design(s). For our first venture, I’ve limited the prompt to the following:

• Attending to Author’s Craft: Use the handout from Troy Hicks (excerpts from his book, Digital Writing Workshop) that highlights different elements of author’s craft you might have highlighted in designing your project. This is not exhaustive– you won’t consider ALL of the elements. Just focus on those that seemed most meaningful to your writing process.
• Elements of Multimodality: Here you might be thinking more about how you have made intentional choices related to  visual (print, image, movement, etc.) and auditory (music, narration, sound effects, etc.) elements. The relationship between these elements will vary based on the medium in which you created your project. They will also depend on the overall goals and direction you had for your project.
• Navigating the Process: Finally, you might also consider the choices you made to troubleshoot or problem solve within the digital spaces you worked. How did these choices impact your final design– either by enhancing or limiting your design process?

Dawnene has suggested that students post their statements to their final Weebly pages, and I cannot wait to see what they have to say! Their final projects will be posted to our Digital Salon which houses a variety of mentor texts (all created by preservice teachers) that might serve as springboards for digital writing projects in any number of future classrooms.