Response to "Designing and Editing Digital Writing"

This chapter takes me back to my journalism training, where we are taught that you need a visual hook into the page (dominant photo--sometimes text), and that in writing you need to use the inverted pyramid because readers truly only have time to skim the articles--only if they're truly interested will they delve. I appreciate that we have to teach students visual literacy (another literacy for me to add to my list) so they can understand what makes readers want to read their sites. I appreciated the process offered by Anne Wysocki (p. 163) for helping students understand the relationships among style, layout, content, audience and purpose.

I want to visit Google Page Maker to find out more about creating your own website. I also want to look at My Comic Book Creator and examples of zines for ideas about how to use these applications in the classroom. Some of my students have used comic book writing as a genre in their writing portfolios, but this might provide them with something better to use than microsoft paint or pen and pencil. Further, I think it's a great idea to try to create some interactive powerpoint presentations to help students build prior knowledge about a novel. I want to think some more about how to integrate these various possibilities into my classroom. I knew about myhighschooljournalism.org, and hearing about it in this book gives me courage to try it out. I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into before, but knowing it's well respected enough to appear in this book makes me want to give it a try for our paper. These are definitely technologies I want to explore more!