When we started our work with Teachology, we didn't have anything as explicit as the Teacher Educator Technology Competencies to work from. We did have ISTE's Educator Standards as inspiration, and we also worked from our own School of Education Standards (though technology was only briefly referenced within two sub-standards). However, the TETCs provide the exact type of framework we needed to guide our project. Alas, we must settle for applying the competencies retroactively :(

I only came across these competencies last week when working on a writing project featuring Teachology's peer-mentorship model of professional learning. Analyzing our work in light of the TETCs was still illuminating as it helped me to identify the dimensions of educator capacities most explicitly targeted within our workshop activities. 

The most relevant TETCs identified include:

• Standard 2: Teacher educators will incorporate pedagogical approaches that prepare teacher candidates to effectively use technology: a) model using technology for accessing, analyzing, creating, and evaluating information; and c) assist teacher candidates with the selection and use of content-specific technologies to support student learning
• Standard 3: Teacher educators will support the development of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of teacher candidates as related to teaching with technology in their content area: b) provide opportunities for teacher candidates to reflect on their attitudes about using technology for teaching and for their own learning; and c) provide opportunities to develop teacher candidates’ efficacy about using technology in teaching.

Great appreciation for the development of this document and the clarity in articulating design goals for educator professional learning-- a resource I will definitely return to in the future!

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.

I recently had the opportunity to engage in extended professional learning around the design of more interactive webinars and wow— did I walk away with a whole new perspective. The training was part of the presenter preparation for the 4T Digital Writing Virtual Conference co-hosted by the University of Michigan and the National Writing Project. While I often serve the “techie” function of moderating webinars for the online courses I teach and facilitate, I’ve never actually designed and presented my own webinar, which may also be one of the reasons why I wasn’t as able to support engaging webinar design. So this was definitely a chance to feel the pressure and perspective from the other side!

Throughout the training, I was struck by the simple yet powerful suggestions that the team presented. Unfortunately, some of these were based on platform features that didn’t necessarily translate to my working context, as our training took place in Blackboard Collaborate while our courses currently use Go To Meeting. The ease of engaging participants on the whiteboard with text, raising their hands, and using polling features were all simple ways to keep them participating throughout. Though I was unable to incorporate these feature-based additions into my future work, there were some more transferable practices I am already putting to use!

• Designing a Lobby Activity: I have found the 15 minutes before a webinar starts to be important to settling tech-nerves for participants and speakers alike. However, we are often left awkwardly sitting around until the time officially begins. Designing a lobby activity as the opening slide provides an opportunity to get participants talking in the chat box, engaging with materials, or reflecting in some form that can carry over into the opening.
• Incorporating Outside Resources: While we have always provided outside resources throughout our webinars, these are usually meant to be referenced at a later date. Alternatively, asking participants to briefly review a resource (reading or video), post questions or feedback to a Google Doc, or engage in another active way during the session helps to move beyond the “lecture” feel of webinars that so many of our presenters dread.
• Taking Time for Application: Transfer to practice is always a major goal of our work, however, we typically just assume it as a natural follow-up to our time together. Instead, it can be more productive to intentionally build in application activities into the structure of the webinar itself. Google Docs or Padlet can provide easy ways for participants to express ideas. During a webinar last week, we set aside time for participants to free write around some prompts and were able to engage with Google Doc commenting even as our participants were still typing. Of course this is not groundbreaking—we do this in the classroom all of the time. However, utilizing this type of activity during a webinar was somehow novel to me in a really meaningful way.​​

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to engage in this training and am excited for the impact it will have on our future webinar planning. I can also say that it already had a powerful impact on my own webinar experience, which went better than I ever could have expected!
I’ve also decided to pilot a platform switch to Blackboard Collaborate during the upcoming semester. Just to capture all of my current thinking, I created the following resource as part of the new preparation materials I will share with presenters to help them design more interactive webinars.

As the Common Core State Standards encourage teachers to capitalize on informational literacy skills across content areas, a common struggle many of us face is limited access to engaging informational texts. Drawing from motivational theories which emphasize the role of reader choice in selecting texts and the importance of engagement to sustained reading, one potential solution is to encourage students to draw from their own resources and interests in “building” a library of informational texts. An easy way to implement such an idea is utilizing a social bookmarking tool such as Diigo, where students can contribute sources, comments, and even collaboratively read texts while they engage in self-selected informational reading. Using the teacher-friendly educational version, I’ve used Diigo with three different age groups emphasizing three different dimensions of informational literacy skills (all while developing digital literacy competencies as well).
A few elements of informational literacy include:

• annotating text
• annotating bibliographies (and even saving sources to create bibliographies!)
• evaluating sources/arguments

A few elements of digital literacies include:

• bookmarking websites
• creating useful tags/tagging in general
• engaging in collaborative digital communities

1. Middle School: The Research Process
One of the largest struggles facing my middle school researchers was keeping track of their sources–no matter what type of graphic organizer I provided them with. First, Diigo solved this problem by making it easy for my students to save their sources to their personal accounts (which also appeared in our class group). Secondly, we began very *tentative* measures towards annotating sources, deciphering what is useful and essential in sources in order to make notes to ourselves that would be useful for later research. Using the comment feature on our bookmarks, students were able to engage in this process. Finally, we were able to expand our notions of research community beyond the limited and often individualized conception of research that takes place in K-12 education. By sharing sources and interest summaries/annotations with our group page, students were able to draw from and recommend sources to peers researching similar topics.

2. High School: Critical Analysis of Sources
High school students still often take authorship at authoritative face-value. So one way to develop a more critical mindset towards the research process was to break down the steps of critically analyzing sources into scaffolded chunks until students were able to not only identify the bias or weakness in arguments but to provide succinct rebuttals. We accomplished this over the course of 6 weeks prior to even beginning our research project, as students posted self-selected informational texts and analyzed the arguments/sources in different ways. Throughout the process, peer samples served as resources of (1) potentially interesting topics and (2) mentor texts to guide the analysis process. Ultimately, students were able to draw from this “library” of topics to select a final research topic, all the while developing a more critical approach to engaging with sources.
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3. College Level: Building a Library of Sources
This project was far less analytical, instead literally serving as a potential hub for students to draw from resources that would help to inform their teaching practices in the future. Students contributed sources that either addressed content area literacy or served as collections of informational texts as they collaboratively constructed exactly the type of informational text library that our classrooms are so often missing.

I first began using technology in my classroom right around the time I first began teaching. Web 2.0 was just beginning to make an impact in educational settings, and rather surprisingly, I was poised as an early adopter. With growing confidence I realized this new “niche” I had stumbled upon would be marketable and meaningful for my professional growth. And yet, I had the whole “thing” backwards.

Creatively redesigning lessons to integrate technology tools helped me to achieve new possibilities in the classroom. However, my planning process typically began by selecting a digital tool/device and then brainstorming when, where, and how I might use it in my class. Later while studying for my Master’s, I realized that this process should be reversed–beginning with my students and their needs and then selecting digital tools that could be repurposed to transform the learning process and experience for students, while also allowing them to explore 21st century skills.

Regardless of my process, an important question I always asked myself was, “how does this technology infused redesigned lesson actually impact/improve/reimagine the content/skills/experience of students?” While there are times when we all turn to technology to aid in ease, communication, or productivity of tasks, it was important to me that revamped lessons “do something more.” Now I finally have a vocabulary to articulate this feeling.
Enter the SAMR Model (Ruben Puentedura; hippasus.com)

Unknown to me before this year, the SAMR Model is making the rounds quickly (and if you haven’t heard of it yet, it is probably on its way in some upcoming pd session). The framework has provided a useful vocabulary and model for discussing and analyzing the role of technology integration in lesson design–an important topic for preservice and practicing teachers alike. There are times when Substitution and Augmentation are strong beginning points–especially for new teachers or new tools–when insecurities might hold back creative risk-taking until greater confidence is built through early successes. It is then that brainstorming ways to move beyond enhancement and towards transformation should become new goals. The stages of Modification and Redefinition help us to analyze exactly what and how our use of technology is impacting/improving/reimagining the content/skills/experience for our students. Framing these stages as a progressive model, one that need not be worked through sequentially but can be visited and revisited at different points as different needs arise is an encouraging and empowering point of view.
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Thank you SAMR Model for helping to clarify and present these important perspectives in such a non-threatening way 

This past week in my Language & Literacy in Elementary Content Areas course we discussed the multiple forms that text can take. We discussed different genres of digital text, from podcasting to digital book covers and graphic representations, and the potential for not only engaging students but providing opportunities for them to see, understand, and respond in new ways–beyond the linear formatting of printed text. Referencing Troy Hick’s new book Crafting Digital Writing, we used the MAPS approach to consider the features of craft present in a variety of digital and multimodal projects. We then put our discussion into practice as students crafted their own comics as a form of reading response.

The Process
Typically, we begin our class with a freewrite journal entry to focus thinking and allow time to reflect upon and synthesize important ideas from our readings. To fully embrace the topic at hand, I decided to use BitStrips for Schools as an alternative form of opening reflection. It was easy and free to create a class and student accounts, and using the tool required no formal explanation of how to get started. Rotating and answering individual questions was enough explanation, as students used their peers to troubleshoot many of the early questions around navigation.
For the activity, I wrote a series of reflection questions based on our readings (just as I usually do for written responses). Then, I asked students to respond in the form a of a BitStrip comic, for which they were only given 20 minutes to create. 

The Prompt
In response to the article Hicks, T., & Turner, K. H. (2013). No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait. English Journal, 6, 58–65.
The authors begin by highlighting some common woes around teaching for digital literacies–or really the lack thereof. Did any of these common practices resonate with you or bring back “fond” memories of your own experiences?

• Counting Slides
• Use a Blog without Blogging
• Criticizing Digitalk
• Asking only questions that can be answered by a search engine
• Using “Cool” Technology to Deliver a Planned Lesson

Have you experienced learning in settings where digital literacies were supported beyond these limited means? Do you have ideas of how you will teach for intentional and meaningful digital literacies in your content area? Or do you question how you are supposed to “know” how to do this when you may never have experienced successful learning in this area yourself?

Reactions
Overall, students were very engaged and had fun during this activity. A few students were unable to use BitStrips on their tablets and instead drew comics on paper. The biggest challenge seemed to be the way students were forced to rethink their thinking. Whereas during a typical freewrite students are encouraged to write about whatever “pops into their heads,” constructing a graphic representation required greater focus and clarity of the idea to be represented. Students mentioned the need to pare down their thoughts to the most essential level–then consider what that would look like both in regards to mixing image and words and the limitations represented by the tool (ie: which background pictures were available, how much space they had, etc). While maybe not the most conducive format for brainstorming, we could see how this would be useful for demonstrating relationships between characters or concepts, creative storytelling, explaining content understandings, or even as vocabulary activities. The one thing students did need more of was time–20 minutes was not nearly enough and not everyone was able to finish. But now that we’ve spent time both reading and constructing graphic stories, it definitely has broadened the range of what constitutes constructing meaning in the classroom.

Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to work with the MCEA-content cohort, a group of future elementary educators I worked with last semester in Teaching English Language Arts. This time I was asked to present on technology integration in the elementary classroom, specifically focusing on science and social studies content areas. In planning how to best use our time, I decided to opt out of the “tools–> idea approach,” which is typical of professional development sessions. Often times, these sessions provide deep insight into applications for a few specific tools, but I find myself wondering what larger conceptual understandings participants are able to develop in order to lead to more diverse and sustained changes in practice? Is it more productive to develop a deep understanding of a tool in order to implement it on return to the classroom–or is it more effective to begin to develop an understanding of the larger framework which might undergird all future decision making processes?
With these questions in mind, I decided to go for the un-sexy approach—no flashy tools, student demonstrations, or lists upon lists. All of this is readily available online, easy to search for, and ever-changing. Instead, we began our work together discussing the considerations that too often get overlooked in our rush to implement the latest and greatest. We focused on the why and the how.

The Why
We spent some time deconstructing the reasoning for integrating technology in the first place–what you hope it will do to transform the learning process and how it will improve and deepen student understanding in a particular context. Implications of this question are also inherent in asking oneself WHO is doing all of the work. Who is creating, collaborating, problem solving, trouble-shooting, and producing with the technology tools–the teacher or the student? This led us to consider how the same tools can be repurposed as “tools for teaching” focusing on teacher-led instruction or as “tools for learning” focusing on student-led inquiry.

The How
Taking the time to develop intentional and well-thought out purposes and goals for rethinking instruction can then lead us to more easily break down the multiple “hows” involved. I broke these into three categories: procedural (implications for planning and attention to the TPACK framework), technical (implications for how teachers and students will learn to use the tools), and logistical (implications for implementing the process in the classroom and communicating to stakeholders).

Quickfire Workshop!
The second half of our time together was focused on group workshop where participants integrated various tools to construct multi-modal representations of central content understandings (tied to Wisconsin’s elementary performance standards). Utilizing laptops, tablets, and cellphones, students were able to brainstorm and execute plans for constructing understandings across tools. For example, one group created a main Prezi hub to which students would post YouTube videos of their work. Each video was actually a screen recording of the student’s own Prezi on the given topic. Students would record their Prezi using Quicktime, import the file into iMovie, then record narration, transitions, and add music before exporting the movie file and uploading to YouTube. This process involved more steps than the students had originally anticipated, but they were eventually able to successfully accomplish the task. What is often overlooked as frustrating or confusing–how to get these tools to “talk to each other”–is actually one of the key opportunities for learning, as students build repertoires of problem solving and trouble shooting strategies that support the independence and distributed expertise needed to tackle unpredictable challenges in the digital landscape. From this perspective, the process truly is just as important as the product, and when carefully scaffolded, can sometimes even provide more lasting insights that will carry over into future work.
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Looking forward to sharing these activities with 309 and 313 in the coming weeks!
Link to the presentation site: Rethinking the Role, Repurposing the Tool: Intentional Planning for Technology in the Classroom

Recently, we’ve been exploring the cognitive approach to literacy instruction and evaluating common cognitive strategies to support the development of reading comprehension. For our final discussion, I decided to use a cognitive mapping strategy to organize our thoughts about this approach to literacy learning.

Enter Popplet
Using the Popplet tool, I set up a brief skeleton of potential topics to cover in reflecting on our understanding of cognitive strategies. Then, students were invited to join the Popplet (and the conversation) by adding their thoughts in the form of branches and bubbles.
The process of collaborating to construct meaning and understand how to use the tool took place through face-to-face discussion with neighbors and through the comments and questions popping up on our page. With little to no instruction on how to use the site, students were able to easily navigate the page, uncover features, and successfully represent our findings.
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Application ideas included using the tool to explore academic vocabulary, organize discussions and interactive support around homework, or brainstorm ideas for a group project, just to name a few. Students also made some insightful suggestions, such as to use the color-coding feature to distinguish the original prompts, integrate multimodal options such as representing through images/videos/drawings in addition to text, and laying out clear expectations for what student contributions should like (establishing norms).
With 27 people simultaneously posting and reviewing on one Popplet, I thought there was potential for an overwhelming mess. It turns out we were far more successful, and now I am far more likely to use this tool in the classroom again!

Sometimes the biggest hurdle to implementing technology in the classroom becomes the technology itself. Teachers become overwhelmed with the logistics of: getting access to working tools, preparing to effectively use them (often through their own play and construction of the desired outcome), planning the implementation process, structuring class time, and managing how to provide support, mentorship, and scaffolding to keep students moving through the technical challenges that will arise. With all of these considerations in mind, it can often be far too easy to overlook the more important question of why?

Why use this tool? What are the benefits or advantages offered? How does this tool capitalize on the demands of the learning objective? Why select this path over another, and how do you critically make selections to repurpose and combine tools within the context of one project?
We might consider how apprenticeship provides an opportunity to introduce complex processes and provide guided practice for beginners. Such an instructional model aligns well with the types of learning needed to master new technology tools. This model is also closely correlated to the Gradual Release of Responsibility, where the responsibility shifts from expert to apprentice through coaching and mentorship.
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However, I wonder if we might also pay equal focus to the importance of cognitive apprenticeship–modeling the thinking processes we undergo as experts in navigating these decision-making processes. This might appear similar to the ways in which English teachers conduct read-alouds (or think-alouds) where the teacher makes visible the typically invisible process of reading by modeling the use of cognitive strategies that expert readers engage in while reading. Applying this strategy to the context of learning with digital tools might help to bridge the gap of critical inquiry into our reasons for and applications of producing with digital tools. These are the types of questions and active critiques students need to develop in their own consumption of digital media and fostering such a perspective might begin here in the act of cognitive apprenticeship–useful for not just teaching tools but teaching thinking about the tools we choose to engage with.