Collections

The Digital Is website hosts a growing collection of stories, reflections, and resources about teaching and learning writing in a digital age. As the collection grows, we hope to maintain a certain point of view about teaching and the practice of writing: heavy on reflection, open to inquiry, focused on authentic student accomplishment.

The prevalence of new multimedia authoring tools has redefined the kinds of writing students can compose in our classrooms. This collection supports students in composing with and using new digital writing tools in purposeful manners.

Youth are communicating with each other and the larger society today using a variety of digital and social media tools, but what are they saying? What possibilities do these digital tools hold for social, political, and economic change?

The Internet is our writing space par excellence, whether we access it via our smartphones, through a Web browser, or using an email application. Here, we delve into a complex narrative of how this space was imagined, designed, and crafted, surfacing important developments worth thinking about.

The Make Movement is a shift towards helping us see the value in the act of creating instead of merely consuming. As more young people spend their time online, it is important for us, as educators, to consider how we can help them develop the agency to move from being passive consumers to active creators.

Many of us maintain profiles across an ever-increasing number of websites, effectively distributing our identities into discrete, albeit linked, chunks. How do our different online incarnations serve our goals for connecting with others? 

At its core, connective writing is the idea that digital writers using digital writing tools create an inherently different kind of writing. What is connective writing, and what might it look like in practice?  Is it new and different?...or simply an extension of what's come before?

Right click. Copy. Paste. Save image as.Is it free for the taking? Or am I breaking the law? Teach and learn about fair use with the resources in this collection.

These resources assume that curricula and teaching approaches for English language learners, as with all learners, should honor students’ own languages, cultures, and interests; engage them in meaningful projects for real audiences; and provide them with a range of tools, including digital tools, for inquiry and composing.