Week 7- Best Practices by Steve Graham, Charles A.

MacArthur, and Michael Hebert, chapters 8-9

Chapter 8 is all about writing with digital tools. It talks about the characteristics of digital

text, the different types of digital tools, the different types of educational apps, and professional

learning networks. It also touches on how digital writing is multimodal, malleable, and

intentional, aspects of digital writing that are considered positive. It gives various examples of

both presentation and content apps, and shows a real classroom example of students listening to

a story and taking notes digitally (including the instructions/reminders that were given by the

teacher beforehand). Chapter 9 is about handwriting and spelling. It talks about the importance,

the best practices, how to assess handwriting, how to promote handwriting, spelling, and the

-ologies: phonology and morphology. Phonology is the teaching of the individual sounds of the

letters in the alphabet and morphology is the teaching of groups of letters in a word (for example,

-ed). These, paired with orthotactics (childrens’ awareness of the letters that are “legal” or able to

be put together) builds childrens’ reading and writing skills.

Chapter 8 was really interesting for me, because I am kind of anti-technology in a way. I

sometimes demonize it too often and think it really hinders childrens’ development. However,

this chapter did change my perspective. I really specifically enjoyed the part where it talked

about the benefits of digital text. I really liked how they said it was malleable, that it could be

constantly changed. I think I could incorporate this aspect into a lesson plan by allowing students

to write narratives and change up the way they look. I would love to host an “author party” after

students write their first narrative and allow them to show them off, both the stories and the way

they look! It also brought up how digital texts are easily publishable and shareable, which is a

great point! Students can share and edit texts even from home if their work is digital. I really

appreciated that this opened my eyes. This section also talked about how digital texts being
multimodal was intentional, which I thought was really cool as well. Chapter 9 was also fun

because I didn’t realize that spelling or handwriting was talked about much beyond the primary

grades. I will definitely use the tactic of allowing students to track their own progress through a

graph in my upper elementary classes, and I can totally see how this would be an effective tool

beyond the primary grades as well. As well as this, chapter 9 talked about spelling. I thought it

was really interesting to learn that children are sensitive to the patterns in words, and likely

understand more than we realize. I will definitely be incorporating phonology and orthotactics

into my spelling lessons as a teacher.

Chapters 8 and 9 were very eye opening for me, and I really enjoyed reading them. They

offered many different things that I wanted to write down to incorporate into my own future

lessons, and I really appreciated that it allowed me to see things from a different perspective.
 Works Cited

Graham, Steve, et al. “Chapters 6 and 7.” Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Guilford Press,

New York, 2019. Kindle Edition.