Thank you to everyone for the opportunity to participate in our inspiring conversation over the last semester and year.  It was a real pleasure as I have learned so much from you:) 

My plan in this brief paragraph (we’ll see @ that) is to re-read the posts for this sequence to see if I can discern the contours of my teaching philosophy for technology in the writing class.  This is a total experiment and I have no idea if it will work or not, yet ideally I can sift out some principles that I can use to guide my use of technology in the writing class.

UNIT 1: How Technology Can = Equityminded Acceleration

UNIT 2: Exploring the Pedagogical Value of Blogs in the Writing Class

UNIT 3: How Can I Use Technology to Enhance/Enact My Teaching Philosopy

UNIT 4: Using Technology to Help Students Understand the Reading Process

UNIT 5: : Perusall, the Reading Process, and Engaged Difficulty

Guiding Principles for Technology in the Writing Class

1. Technology in the Writing Class enhances your equity-based teaching: for example you can embed basic skills and use technology to guide students through the reading and writing process
2. Technology enables you to “capture” and “archive” the work you do as a class as you move through the reading/writing process so that all of the scaffolding and knowledge you assembled as you worked on this or that is available for students to use when they are drafting an essay
3. You can use technology to open up your class towards writing that is more engaging, creative, owned by students. Laura Gibbs talks about using blogs in the writing class in her episode of teaching in higher ed and I write about this in my post for unit 2.  My students now used Piktochart and Canva to create an info-graphic on an issue they selected and were totally engaged by this assignment.
4. In organizing your course content–think about process–replicating in your organizational scheme the reading process, writing process, collective knowledge-building process: In designing your online courses ask: how can I organize my unit content to emulate X process? Image that underprepared students scrolling through your unit before sitting down to write the first draft of an essay: What would you want them to see?
5. Technology enhances our ability to teach Culturally Responsive Courses: we can use Ted Talks, You Tube Videos, the work of historically underrepresented writers and artists–technology opens up our courses to culturally responsive content and approaches
6. It is possible to create authentic caring relationships in online environments.  I use “authentic caring” here  in the way Angela Valenzuela defines it in Subtractive Schooling.