CI 5475: Teaching Digital Writing Reflection

For my final project I created a website for teachers to visit and get digital writing / reading lessons (http://digitalwritinginpractice.webs.com) Note: The webs.com page does not seem to open from the University of Minnesota campus, not sure why. One of the objectives for the website was to create a repository of lessons that I have built that contain everything you need for a lesson; alignment to MN common core standards, objectives, materials list, word files to edit for later use, and other files, such as Exam View assessments or Moodle course files. There are many, many resource sites out there, but none that offer a complete alignment and lesson plan. My goal is to continue to expand this repository and ultimately design a site that teachers, (mainly myself :) could go download one zip file and have everything they need.

In designing this website, I used the webs.com website, which is very easy to use, but has some glitches. For one, there is a limit of 10 pages before you need to subscribe and pay a monthly fee. Also, there is an issue with proprietary work ... if I ever stop using the site, I would lose that information. With that being said, my plan is to covert the lessons I have created and rebuild the site using Dreamweaver and hosting it under my own domain. This way, I would have full control over the html and content. When you look at the site, you will notice that I started building a navigational system by identifying "splash" pages like "Microblogging tools". These pages would categorize and organize the content. Because I will not be using webs.com for this project, and I could only build 10 pages, I took out the other "splash" pages and added direct links. I left the microblogging, just to show how I envision navigation. For this project I completed lessons using the following applications:  

• VoiceThread
• Woices 
• Storybird 
• Pivot Animation (this is the only non-cloud based program I have listed) 
• Popplet

  


Note: The completed lessons are ones I will be using in my classes this year, with the exception of Voicethread, which I will not be using for my classes due to the cost. I plan on using a very similar "introduce yourself" lesson with popplet.
 
In addition to the website for the teachers, the homepage of this blog will be used for students,which also contains embedded examples of the tools and instruction for students. 

This project is intended to demonstrate a synthesis of the concepts from this course by showing examples of digital tools and lesson plans. In creating this website, I came across many more creative tools for digital reading and writing and will incorporate lessons from those tools into the expanding website. Thank You - Patrick