Note: This is the first in a series of posts this week about how I try to support learners in my room by using mentor texts for digital writing. These posts, plus writing by Bill Bass, Katie DiCesare, Troy Hicks, Kevin Hodgson and Franki Sibberson are being collected at Mentor Texts in the Digital Writing Workshop
"Texts are teachers."
-Jeff Anderson in 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know
The idea of using mentor texts for helping writers is not new. In fact I think I have over 10 books in my professional library that espouse the virtues of using mentor texts. The struggle I have had over the last few years as I have tried to develop a more "digital writing workshop" is finding examples of quality writing that is published online that can be used as a mentor text to teach my 4th grade students.
Because of the myriad of what I would call "not-so-great-work" on the web, I have found myself starting my journey of helping students digitally compose by using great non-digital mentor texts to support the compostion of their work. Then trying to pick the correct tool to get there work online for a greater audience. Essentially, my goal is for the kids in my room to produce a valuable piece of writing that could be appreciated on piece of paper written in pencil first. Because if we can read a poem, story or essay written with traditional tools and say, "That is awesome" it will be even better if we can make it look good and publish it online.
I believe this is incredibly important. As teachers we can quickly become overwhelmed with the bells and whistles of various tools. I have fallen into this trap many times. I remember when Glogster was unleashed in my room a few years ago, I completely forgot to support quality writing and many of my students ended up with fantiscally awesome looking (or terribly awful looking) Glogs that served no purpose other than to potentially create a seizure for the reader trying to navigate the page. My thinking is that we don't need to Glog, Comic Life, Pixie or PowerPoint our classrooms to nth degree. What I think we should be doing is help our children stretch themselves as writers, then help the kids share this writing with a tool that makes sense.
Jeff Anderson's quote above that is so simple is also so powerful. I find the idea that texts are teachers can be both positive and negative. If we can put great models for the possibilites of writing into the hands of our children, then we can expect more positive results in terms of the quality of their writing. If we are short sighted in what models we use by focusing on the bells and whistles of the tool, then we can expect some great bells and whistles, but not-so-great-writing.
So when my class published their first work online this year, we started slow by look at one mentor text specifically for the idea of the project. Then the kids explored many other picture books and poetry books to look for ways to make their writing stronger and more vivid.
Our class project was tittled "The Best Part of Us." It is based on a fabulous picture book titled The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald. We read excerpts from this book. We looked closely at the photographs that accompanied the writing. Then using an brainstorming app called Popplet on our iPads we began to brainstorming possible "best parts" of us. After decisions were made, we we began drafted our short pieces of writing to describe these best parts, we went back to the original mentor text and review the pieces in that book. Then students began using a collection of picture books and poetry titles that I pulled that I felt the writing strongly emphasized descriptive details. Some of the class drafted in their writer's notebooks, but some of the class drafted on the Keynote app on their iPads. I chose Keynote as the tool for this project because I wanted the class to explore this incredibly useful tool. For those of you who are not in Mac school districts, Keynote is a lot like PowerPoint. I also chose Keynote because the goal of the project was to create a class "picture book" that could be easily shared online.
One of the key things the class learned throgh the process of building their Keynote slide was the idea of "just because you can do something with a dgital tool, doesn't mean you should do something." Through trial and error the students in my room changed the look of their Keynote by playing around with different backgrounds, text fonts and sizes and various other things that could increase the wow factor of their work. For the most part, what they realized is that the cool factor cannot overcome poor writing. This was something that I considered to be a big "win" for our room.
Below is the final product. It was posted on our class website to the delight of the class and their families. An interesting side note is that nearly every student wanted to go back on change something after seeing their classmates' work.
While some of the slides might not be great models of writing or design, I am sure the quality of the final product would have been significantly less if we hadn't used picture books and poems for mentor texts. If all we had done was go to Slideshare and check out some presentations that had been uploaded or just use Keynote as a tool to impress our audience with the wow factor, I don't think our writing would have been as strong.
"The Best Part of Us" is just one example of how I use non-digital mentor texts as the basis for creating digital texts. When I reflect on this journey I am on to encourage students to produce work that can be shared online I do think it seems a little odd that I may be spending more time with traditional mentor texts than digital ones. But I do think that starting with a great peice of writing as a mentor text, regardless of the format is really, really important.
The power in being able to produce work digitally can be huge for children. It allows them to understand that many, many people can read their work. It allows them to explore new tools to produce writing. It allows them to create pieces of work that have more polish then they could produce in more traditional ways. However, if our focus is on the "polish" and not the writing then what is the point of taking the time to produce these dgital texts?
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