Chapter 7: Writing Online

In this book, Chapter 7 is called, "Writing Online." This chapter focuses on the main idea of "digital writing," which is defined as "compositions created with, and oftentimes for reading or viewing on a computer or other devices that is connected to the Internet." While reading further into this chapter, it also discusses the different types of online blogs that may be used that is occurring in technology now. From my experiences with writing blogs and reading different blogs they are usually intended to comment, review or critique different works of literature as well as other things such as movies, music, social issues and etc. The book then states a great insight on the strategies on writing blogs such as, "showing an awareness of audience, especially a worldwide audience, synthesizing information across multiple sources, evaluating the relevance of connections, and evaluating the relevance of additional images and media." This definitely was an eye opener when writing blogs.

During my college career, I have taken online courses where we had to use Blackboard, for example. Blackboard is an online source where college students and the teachers can communicate with eachother and students can submit in their work. There has been times where the professor has taken a day off, for personal reasons, and because she didn't want us to get behind in our school work, she would make us go online and post something about what we were talking about. She would post some ideas and each one of us would go after that idea and elaborate our own interpretation of the idea and from there we can comment on each others ideas. Online blogging and commenting is such a resourceful took because students can then share their own information and interpretations, which is basically what this chapter is touching base on. 

One of the techniques that the chapter talks about is using the anchor charts. When reading this section, I found it to be very resourceful as the anchor chart is an effective scaffold for students' to learn during modeled lessons. Anchor charts are created by both teachers and students who are meant to highlight specific guidelines or behaviors for performing a particular strategy. I personally have never seen an anchor chart before but by reading the section for it I believe that it will be effective to use in the classroom. I would love to use something like this in the future!