In 2008, a project from the MacArthur Foundation completed three years of research on youth and new media. They found today's young people have an "always-on" relationship with digital media.

Combining multimedia and online forms of writing can help us connect with learners in ways that are relevant, authentic, and meaningful to them. 

What follows are ideas for ways you can incorporate digital writing across the curriculum.

Students want to know that their ideas, work, and effort matter. It is important to share their writing with the wider world. Wixie makes that easy, with the ability to simply share their writing as digital books via the project URL or embedded into your classroom website. 

Students want to be published, so even if you don't have the technology set up to share, be sure to print and share. Students can write about the stages in a cycle like metamorphosis and then print as a booklet for a tangible copy they can take home to review with parents.

Digital storytelling is not just creating a video about something. Digital storytelling showcases the author's perspective about an event or idea. It helps validate what a learner is thinking and prompts them to reflect on content.

"Designing and communicating information requires students to deepen their understanding of content while increasing visual, sound, oral language, creativity, and thinking skills," shares Bernajean Porter in her article The Art of Digital Storytelling. In Digital Storytelling Across the Curriculum, she elaborates, "The digital storytelling process helps us transform isolated facts into illuminated, enduring understandings. By 'living in the story,' we make information come emotionally alive."

The visual nature of comics helps students cement ideas through nonlinguistic representation across many subject areas. Because of the limited space for text in a panel, students must summarize, helping them learn to analyze content to evaluate which information is critical to share. 

Even if students aren't Pokemon or FIFA fans, most students have traded cards on a topic they are passionate about. Ask students to write informational text about historic figures important to a time period, domain-specific vocabulary, or even elements on the periodic table. 

Interviewing a person, place, or thing is a great way to 1) keep students from simply copying and pasting information without thinking, as well as 2) build skills in learning how to ask questions. In today's world of overwhelming information, it is less important to know and more important to know how to question.

Many of our students have been watching television since they could sit up. While they generally don't like the news, it is impressive how quickly they turn into news anchors when given a microphone. Like a comic, a news report requires students to pick and choose what information is the most important to share. It helps them see how to write informational text in a way that isn't dry and boring.

It is more important to get started than to get it perfect. If you aren't sure about jumping in from an instructional side, use these science and social studies lesson plans that incorporate writing through interesting digital products.

No matter what content your students are writing about or which media they choose to share their understanding, Wixie can help motivate students to write across the curriculum in ways that engage them with the content and build solid understandings.