8 Writing, Storytelling, and Publishing
Chapter Intro
Writing, storytelling, and publishing activities provide a way for students to work through ideas, reflect on their learning, share what they’ve learned, and interact with their instructor and their peers. The recipes in this chapter provide ideas for a variety of activities that can be used either regularly throughout the semester, or as a larger project that students work on throughout the semester. If you’d like to dive deeper into ideas specific to teaching writing online, please
check out this blog post from DLINQ.
Reflective Journals
A reflective journal is a digital writing space in the form of a document where students can reflect in writing on their own learning. Reflective journals can be used in courses in an ongoing way by providing a continuous space where students can jot down observations, ideas, and analyses about their own learning process as the course progresses. Reflective journals can provide useful documentation of growth for students, and can also help inspire ideas for larger projects or assignments. Reflective journal assignments can be integrated in Canvas using Google docs with a feature called “Collaborations” and can be shared with the teacher and/or with other students depending on the desired audience. Teachers can assign students to add reflections — or entries — to their journal on a regular basis throughout the term.
Prep Ahead
Create and share a clear prompt with students for each entry in the reflective journal, and make sure they understand the purpose of the reflective writing assignments in your course.
Ingredients
- Explanation of the purpose of the reflective journal
- Learning goal(s)
- Prompts/expectations for students for each entry
- Assessment and/or feedback strategy
Step by Step Instructions
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- Identify your learning goal(s). Do you want students to reflect in writing in order to:
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- Better-understand their own learning processes?
- Map the ways their learning changes and develops over time?
- Further develop their thinking and ideas for larger projects?
- Connect and support a learning community by sharing feedback with peers and/or the teacher?
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- Create a prompt for the journal entry. Sample prompts:
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- Reflect on your learning process during this past week in our course. What challenged your thinking? What frustrated you? What were some “aha” moments you experienced? How would you like to explore your ideas further next week?
- What is an idea that struck your imagination this week or that troubled you in some way? How might you dig deeper so as to uncover what captured your attention about it?
- What worked and did not work for you this week? Why?
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- Choose a tool. Choose your tool for creating reflective journals based on how you are conducting your course and how you want students to make use of their journals.
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- Are you teaching with Canvas? Then consider integrating Google docs using the “Collaborations” feature (see link below). You can also create a shared Google Drive folder using Course Hub and add a link to that folder using Canvas.
- Are you sharing content using Google drive or OneDrive separately from Canvas? You could simply create a shared folder using Course Hub and ask students to add their reflective journal documents there.
- Are you teaching with a shared website created with a web authoring tool such as WordPress? Consider adding students as authors and asking them to publish posts. Note: this option would require students comfort with sharing their reflections publicly on the open web.
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- Give feedback/assess.
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- Given that reflecting in writing can make some students feel vulnerable due to the potentially private nature of their entries (depending on what prompt you choose), be sure to honor student voice by ensuring they understand you approach their work with compassion and care first and foremost. Leave constructive criticism, if any, for the very end.
- In general, since reflective journals are a space where students are analyzing their own experiences, the instructor has the opportunity to focus more on receiving and responding to ideas and less on providing objective assessment of student work.
- Rather than inserting many comments throughout entries, which can be overwhelming, keep your comments to the very end. Ask questions to help prompt students to share more information and deepen their thinking. Avoid evaluating entries and instead focus on using them to start conversations.
- If your prompt asks students to share anything personal, lead by example and offer a personal example from your own context in your feedback.
EXAMPLE
Middlebury Professor Louisa Stein had students work on reflective journals for her Remix Culture course, occasionally asking them to share out pieces of their writing with classmates or with her. Louisa developed a WordPress site using Middcreate, which she used as a base for the course, but she allowed students to choose their own platform for their reflective writing, including using pen and paper, if preferred.
Over the course of the semester, you’ll be keeping a reflective journal – that is, a place where you record quotes from the reading that you find especially striking, responses, reflections, queries, examples, counterexamples, etc. This can also be a space where you write initial reflections and self assessments on your own work over the course of the semester. Sometimes during our class zoom sections, I may ask you to brainstorm thoughts or jot down responses to videos in your journal.
Your reflective journal could be in the form of an analogue notebook or a google doc, whatever you prefer. On occasion you might share aspects of your reflective journal with fellow classmates during class discussions, or with me during individual conferences, but this reflective journal is predominantly for you–it’s meant to be a personal reflective space. The work you do within can then serve as a resource for the rest of your work in the class.
Additional Resources
Blogging
Blogging is a way for students to create public-facing content that can be read and shared on the open web. Typically blogging consists of a serial publication of posts on a website which enables readers to encounter the most recent post first. Students can participate in this exercise either by creating and managing their own blog, or by adding posts as individual authors to a group website managed by the teacher. An additional option to consider if students already have their own independent blogs would be to syndicate student-authored posts published on their individual sites into a class website managed by the teacher. No matter which option you choose, it is important to ensure students have full awareness that their posts in the blog space are intended for public consumption, and that they are comfortable sharing content on the open web.
Prep Ahead
Create a website and either add students as authors or syndicate their pre-existing websites. Share a prompt with students for each post they publish, and make sure they understand the purpose and nature of the post-authoring assignment.
Ingredients
- Explanation of the purpose of the blogging assignment
- Learning goal(s)
- Prompts/expectations for students for each post
- Technical training delivered to students on writing/publishing posts if needed
- Assessment and/or feedback strategy
Step by Step Instructions
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- Identify your learning goal. Do you want students to author blog posts in order to:
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- Better-understand the technical aspects of authoring and publishing blog posts?
- Create a public-facing stream of content where they can interact with readers?
- Work on creating a professional web-presence?
- Connect with and support each other as a public audience for class-generated content?
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- Create a prompt for a blog post. Sample prompts:
- Reflect on your learning gains over the past week in our course. How has this past week contributed to your professional presence and understanding of the field? What would you like a professional audience to know about what you have learned?
- What public-facing dialogue would you like to have about an issue or topic that was discussed in our class?
- What issue is of professional concern to you, and how would you like to invite readers to exchange ideas with you about it?
Note: In some cases, a student blog may be used as part of a larger assignment in which students themselves might determine their own prompts. In those types of instances, the instructor should make sure the overall focus of the blog aligns with the assignment guidelines.
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- Choose a tool.
- Choose your tool for creating a blog. Make sure your choice aligns with your overall goals so that students can focus on the aspects of the assignment that are most important.
- Be prepared to spend necessary time training students unfamiliar with the tool to use it. WordPress is a useful tool to use, but if students are unfamiliar it can take some time to get them up to speed.
- If students already have their own websites, choose a tool for your class blog that will enable syndication of their posts into your blog.
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- Give feedback / assess.
- Given that publishing on the open web can make some students feel vulnerable, make sure to ask students how they would most benefit from your feedback. In some cases, students may wish to receive feedback privately and not as a published response to their published posts.
- In general, since blogging is a public-facing exercise, the instructor has the opportunity to focus more on starting conversations with students based on their published entries, rather than on providing assessments of their work.
- If teacher comments will be inserted into the published post, keep them very succinct and supportive so as not to overwhelm your student. Avoid evaluating entries and instead focus on using them to start conversations.
- If your prompt asks students to share anything personal, lead by example and offer a personal example from your own context in your feedback.
Additional Resources
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Class Collaborative Textbook
Class collaborative textbooks are usually open educational resources (OER) that involve students researching, writing, and editing to produce online textbooks. Collaborative textbooks can promote inquiry based learning, creativity, and collaboration. Students have the chance to synthesize ideas, communicate their learning, and connect their classroom experiences to a wider public audience. As an OER, a collaborative textbook can also promote equitable learning by eliminating textbooks expenses.
Prep Ahead
Because a collaborative textbook is a large undertaking, it’s helpful to identify your learning goals and your publishing tool before the class begins. If you or your students will require technical assistance, you should identify the people or resources that you will need early on. Build in time during class for technical trainings and have a plan for how students will seek technical support. Additionally, not every student will necessarily have a laptop, so you should ensure that all students can equitably participate in the textbook. You might consider reserving lab space or helping students access shared computers on campus. Since textbooks are typically public facing projects, you also need to consider the importance of student privacy and licensing and involve students in these decisions.
Ingredients
- Learning goal(s)
- Prompts/expectations for students
- Preferred publishing tool
- A workflow or project management strategy
- Assessment and/or feedback strategy
Step by Step Instructions
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- Identify your learning goals. Do you want students to create a collaborative textbook in order to:
- Synthesize ideas and communicate their learning?
- Develop comprehension of the course content?
- Connect their learning to a wider, more public audience?
- Work collaboratively to set goals, deadlines, and roles?
- Practice playing multiple different roles (researcher, writer, editor, etc.)?
- Provide forward looking feedback to peers and incorporate feedback into revisions?
- Integrate media from various sources?
- Gain proficiency with publishing platforms?
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- Create a prompt/instructions for the textbook.
You might ask students to create a textbook either for future students of the course or for a generalist audience. Students might consider how to explain difficult course concepts to a reader unfamiliar with the content. They could identify gaps in the course content or highlight underrepresented stories, people, or ideas. You could also ask students to provide context and framing for primary materials and create their own edited collection. Students should have a clear sense of what they’re contributing to the textbook. Are they writing a whole chapter or just parts of one? Are they writing an introduction or conclusion? Be sure to provide clear guidelines about multimedia and how you expect students to integrate text, images, and videos. Below are two sample assignments to help you formulate your own prompts:
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- Choose a publishing tool.
Pressbooks and Scalar are two of the most popular tools for creating textbooks. Both are free to Middlebury users. Pressbooks provides more of a traditional, linear textbook format. Scalar allows for more non-linear connections between topics, but does have a higher learning curve. You can see examples of what each tool can do in the next section.
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- Develop a workflow for students.
It can be helpful to break up the process of creating a textbook into smaller chunks with individual deadlines. You might have phases for researching, drafting, editing, and revising. It can be useful to track the different phases so all participants know who is doing what and when. A basic spreadsheet or Google doc might work. You can also consider tools specifically designed for project management such as Trello or Asana.
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- Give feedback / assess.
Because collaborative textbooks have a lot of moving parts, you’ll need to make sure to clearly define what elements students are responsible for and what you’ll be assessing. You might provide guidelines around what content students should cover and how they should present the content, both in terms of style and use of multimedia. Students should also have the opportunity to receive formative feedback throughout the process, so you might scaffold the assignment to include low stakes activities and peer review. You might also consider involving your students in the assessment process by asking them to decide what features of the textbook are important. Together you can design an assessment rubric. Looking at examples of collaborative textbooks you would like to emulate can be beneficial. It can also be helpful to assess the process of creating a textbook as well as the final product. Asking students to reflect on the process can provide insight into how their teams functioned and demonstrate the importance of process in relation to product.
EXAMPLES
Social Class and the Environment from Hector Vila, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College. This example uses Scalar.
The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature from Robin DeRosa, Director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University. This example uses PressBooks.
Additional Resources
Podcasting
Podcasting is a great way to strengthen a student writers’ voice and encourage them to connect to new audiences in a conversational tone. It also provides a means to consider how ideas and concepts should be organized to tell a story to listeners, as well as how reorganizing can shape or manipulate a message.
The term podcasting is often used to refer to any sort of audio-only delivery of content; however, podcasting refers to a sequence of audio programs either for a limited series or delivered at a set frequency (weekly, biweekly, etc.) For most classes, creating a series of audio files is only possible if the entire class contributes work throughout the semester (see the Student Panel Podcast example from Daniel Chatham’s class below). Using the term podcasting to describe any audio project, however, allows students to mine through a vast treasure trove of examples from which they might model their work.
For the purposes of this recipe, we could envision faculty and students creating podcasts for the following purposes:
| Option |
Purpose |
Creator |
Audience |
| 1 |
Course content lecture |
faculty |
students |
| 2 |
Podcast project for summative assessment |
students |
defined by professor to fit purpose of assignment |
| 3 |
Replacement for text – audio feedback on coursework |
faculty or students |
students |
| 4 |
Primary course content |
expert(s) in the field |
students |
You’ll notice that a key part of podcasting or audio delivery of any type is the target audience. Changing the target audience can drastically change the focus of the podcast content, requiring students to adjust their work as they consider the preexisting knowledge base of their audience.
For the purposes of this recipe, we will focus on option #2 above: a podcast project for summative assessment.
Prep Ahead
Determine the genre of the podcast that you’d like students to create. Sharing some examples of the types of podcasts that reflect the type of work that you’d like them to do can be really helpful. Some common podcast genres are listed below. It can also be helpful to consider how long you would like the podcast to be, and the amount of time that it will take for students to plan, create, and finalize their work. This Podcasting Curriculum Guide from NPR gives a great overview of the number of steps involved in creating this sort of project.
Here are a few sample podcast genres:
- Educational
- Interview
- Discussion/conversational
- Monologue
- Nonfiction narrative storytelling
- Fiction narrative storytelling
- Investigative
- Theatrical
Ingredients
- Explanation of the purpose of the assignment
- Learning goal(s)
- Expectations for students for both content and production
- Software and hardware tools
- Assessment and/or feedback strategy
Step by Step Instructions
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- Identify your learning goal – Outline and explain the learning that you will be assessing through your review of the student podcasts. Ensure that you are comfortable with the evidence that you will be looking for to determine that the learning goal(s) have been met. Often the exercise of creating a rubric for the assignment will help to clarify these points while also offering guidance to your students.
- Create your assignment description – Using your learning goal(s) as a guide, write the description of your assignment. This should include the process that you expect students to follow as well as benchmarks for when different components should be completed in order to ensure that students will meet your deadline. In multi-step projects it is helpful to map out the process with a suggested timeline as a scaffold that students can measure their progress against. (It’s also a great way to try to avoid procrastination.) You may even choose to integrate draft submissions and feedback cycles (with yourself and/or among students) into your timeline.
- Choose a tool – This will depend on the type of project you are assigning and the expertise level of your students. It is often a good idea to give students several different options for tools so they can make a selection based on their comfort and knowledge level. As an example, offering both Audacity and Adobe Audition as options allows students to choose between a low-barrier-to-entry option (Audacity) and a more robust and advanced audio editing tool (Audition – available for download with your Middlebury credentials). In addition, providing students with resources for borrowing recording equipment is often a great idea as it can help ensure better audio quality. At Middlebury College, the library is a great resource for hardware borrowing. At Middlebury Institute, Media Services offers equipment loans, and DLINQ’s Digital Learning Commons offers podcasting booths and tools, along with student intern assistance.
- Give feedback/assess – With podcasting projects, it is often a good idea to ask students to submit a project proposal prior to the start of their work. This helps ensure that their ideas will meet the objectives of the assignment. Podcasts allow a lot of room for flexibility, so it is a good idea to make sure that both you and your students are on the same page before a lot of work gets done. Sometimes incorporating a storyboarding step into the project proposal can give you the amount of detail necessary to determine if the project has the right focus and is scoped appropriately. This step will also help you when it comes time for the final assessment as you can refer back to your notes and the students’ plan to see how well the finished product meets the established learning goals.
- Determine the software that is available to students. A few common options:
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- Audacity – a free, open-source, cross-platform compatible audio editing desktop application
- Zoom – can be used to record audio conversations in multiple audio files
- Panopto – can be used to share audio files
- Adobe Audition – a professional audio editing tool. Lots of functionality, but also more complex to use. Available for download with your Middlebury credentials.
Additional Resources
Digital Storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful age-old form of communicating knowledge and culture in a captivating, memorable, and creative form. It facilitates connections between people and ideas, as well as connections between the past, present, and future. Storytelling can also help facilitate understanding of complex ideas, and promote inclusion and diversity in the classroom.
In addition to text, digital storytelling makes use of contemporary technologies such as video, audio, and still images or illustrations to help communicate a story. It can be a compelling and powerful learning approach in any academic discipline or topic, whether the content is grounded in fiction or nonfiction. As Silvia Tolisano emphasizes in her post Digital Storytelling: What it is and what it is not: It “is not about creating media… it is about creating meaning.”
Some of the skills that students can practice and develop through digital storytelling include communication, research, organization, information literacy, visual literacy, decision-making, critical thinking, discovering concept connections, vocabulary, presentation, mapping, publishing, and creative expression, along with content mastery, as they are essentially teaching content to others when they share their developed story.
Prep Ahead
Determine what topic(s) students will be focused on, who their target audience will be, and what platform you plan to use for sharing and/or publishing. You will also want to determine whether the stories students create for class will be publicly shared, shared only with you, or shared with the class at large.
Ingredients
- Learning goal(s)
- Topic guidelines
- Prompts/expectations
- A platform or choice of platforms that allow students to develop multimodal stories
- Assessment and/or feedback strategy
Step by Step Instructions
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- Identify your learning goals. Do you want students to develop and create digital stories in order to engage in:
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- Close/critical analysis (e.g., students choose a guiding question, research the topic, and develop a news story about a specific topic)
- Creative expression (e.g., students choose a modality or multiple modalities and design an artistic exploration or expression of a topic or theme or personal passion)
- Deepening understanding (e.g., students provide context and promote understanding through multimodal storytelling about a specific topic, theme, or question)
- Interaction (e.g., using storytelling as a means of fostering discussion among students around a learning topic, in which everyone’s story focuses either on a different aspect of that topic, or on a personal expression about a topic)
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- Provide students with topic guidelines, or allow them to choose their own topic, theme, or guiding question for their stories
- Decide whether students will be allowed to work in pairs, small teams, only solo, or if it’s up to them whether they want to work solo or on a team.
- Provide students with prompts and expectations for their stories, including guidelines about:
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- Story length
- Story topic (e.g., assigned topic, limited choice, open choice)
- Story focus (e.g., fiction or nonfiction or open choice)
- Story audience (e.g., academic, general public, other students, workers in a specific discipline, open to student’s own choice, etc.)
- Story organization/structure (i.e., if you have expectations that stories follow a particular format, flow, or structure, or if it is open to the student to determine)
- Modality (e.g., use of video, text, still images, audio or voiceover, specific platforms, mixed modality, student choice of modality and/or platforms)
- Citations (how borrowed or adapted work included in the story should be cited)
- Sharing (e.g., public, private, semi-private, student choice, etc.)
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- Have students develop a storyboard that includes how each section of the story will be presented (e.g., via video, text, photos, drawings, etc). This Start-to-Finish Storyboarding post from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley is a nice resource centered on storyboarding for multimodal content. Students can:
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- hand draw a storyboard
- use a spreadsheet or document table to create a storyboard
- use a free digital tool like Canva to create a storyboard, or
- use a range of Adobe tools, available for free for Middlebury students and faculty
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- Choose a platform or platforms for students to develop and share their stories, or allow them to choose their own. Keep in mind that if you’re introducing a new technology, students will need some time to learn and practice with that tech before embarking on a big project using it. If possible, try to choose a platform that you know your students are already familiar with, or build in some time to the project timeline to allow them to get familiar with the platform in addition to building out their story, as well as providing some guided learning and example projects that make use of the tool. Some options available for free to Middlebury students and faculty include:
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- Provide students with assessment criteria and rubrics for their digital storytelling project. Social annotation, peer review, and self-reflection can all be powerful strategies for assessment and feedback in digital storytelling.
EXAMPLE
Intermediate Arabic
Prof. Kerstin Wilsch, Middlebury’s Jordan School Abroad
Guiding question: What are the reasons people choose to leave their country for an extended period of time, and what challenges do they face in leaving?
ASSIGNMENT
Students will have the opportunity to apply what they learn during the semester in a storytelling project using StoryMaps. They will be sharing their content using Arabic. Students will develop a persona focused on someone who has decided to migrate / leave their country for a period of time. Students will create the reasons for this decision to leave (from deliberately choosing to study or work in another country, to being forced to migrate for economic or security reasons, everything is possible). The instructor will provide mini-assignments throughout the semester, through which students will add content about their persona and their migration experiences to their StoryMaps. Students will begin by crafting a letter to a fictional friend in the persona’s voice, explaining why they are leaving and what challenges they expect to face.
Additional Resources
- What Is Digital Storytelling, by Bulent Dogan, Ed.D., College of Education, University of Houston
- Digital Storytelling: What it is and what it is not, by Silvia Tolisano
- 12 Ideas for Amplified Forms of Digital Storytelling, by Silvia Tolisano
- The Power of Storytelling, from The Health Foundation, UK
- List of resources that house free stock images, illustrations, audio, and videos
