This document discusses strategies for electronic writing in the classroom. It describes how Google Sites can be used for student ePortfolios to showcase writing projects and reflections. Students in WRIT 100 and 101 create ePortfolios linking course outcomes to artifacts, while WRIT 102 students discuss a significant learning experience. Benefits of ePortfolios include teaching reflection, signaling a commitment to student-centered learning, and offering flexibility in assessment. The document also explores using Wikipedia for writing assignments, with students evaluating course content on Wikipedia and proposing edits after learning editing skills. Challenges of this approach include risk, trolls, and pressure for accuracy. Resources for both Google Sites ePortfolios and Wikipedia assignments are provided.

1. Easy Strategies for
Electronic Writing
Robert Cummings
Center for Writing and Rhetoric
University of Mississippi
2013

2. Two Strategies for Electronic
Writing in the Classroom
Google Sites for Eportfolios
Writing with Wikipedia

3. Google Sites for ePortfolios
• How we use Google Sites at CWR
• “Showcase” portfolio
WRIT 100 and WRIT 101: “Choose one outcome
from the course syllabus, and one course
artifact which helped you learn that outcome,
and discuss the relationship between the
two.”

4. Google Sites for ePortfolios
Writing Process: Students will demonstrate writing as a process that requires
brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading.
Exploration and Argument: Students will use writing to respond to readings,
explore unfamiliar ideas, question thinking different from their own,
reflect on personal experiences, and develop sound arguments.
Purposes and Audience: Students will produce writing suitable for a variety
of purposes, with an emphasis on academic purposes.
Research: Students will integrate primary sources with their own ideas
through summary, paraphrase, and quotation, and document those sources
properly.
Conventions and Mechanics: Students will produce writing that is free of
serious grammatical and mechanical errors.

5. Google Sites for ePortfolios
Example of WRIT 100 ePortfolio Reflective
Introduction
https://sites.google.com/a/go.olemiss.edu/ad
davis/writing-101/reflective-introduction

6. Google Sites for ePortfolios
• How we use Google Sites at CWR
• “Showcase” portfolio
WRIT 102 and LIBA 102: “Identify your most
significant learning experience, select any
course artifact(s) which helped you achieve
that learning experience, and discuss the
significance for a public audience.”

7. Google Sites for ePortfolios
WRIT 102 ePortfolio Reflective Introduction
Prompt
https://sites.google.com/a/go.olemiss.edu/ad
davis/writing-102/reflective-
introduction/writ-102-reflective-
introduction-prompt

8. Benefits: Google Sites for
ePortfolios
ePortfolios are a process, not a
particular technology or platform.
For example, during the fall 2010 pilots, too often we tended to focus on the
strengths and weaknesses of the Chalk & Wire platform and associate those
observations with “ePortfolio” generally. Though Chalk & Wire will not be our
permanent ePortfolio tool, by wrestling with it and the issues it presents
(e.g., student access to the Internet in the classroom, the method of
classroom assignments for the CWR, the challenges of single sign on,
Blackboard integration, classroom population, use of an appropriate rubrics,
accommodation of multimodal assignments), we have grown as a program.
These are not issues that the Freshman Writing Program was engaging in
2009. By engaging these issues, we are making lasting changes toward a new
paradigm for teaching writing which will improve our students’ writing
abilities and expand their literacy.

9. Benefits: Google Sites for
ePortfolios
Teaching with ePortfolios signals a
program commitment to teaching
reflection as an enduring academic
value.
Reflection, or the ability to independently assess one’s status in
relationship to a learning experience, is bound up with the act of writing.
Furthermore, the ability to self-reflect is an increasingly essential skill as
the process of higher education becomes more and more heterogeneous
and fragmented, with more interdisciplnarity, multiple institutions, and
multiple teaching and learning settings. Teaching reflection as a program
value will not be easy, as most of our students have not experienced it as
an education goal. We will have to grow in terms of recognizing what
constitutes authentic and valuable assessment; ePortfolios implicitly
challenge us to examine some of our more negative assumptions about
whether or not students learn at all in our classrooms.

10. Benefits: Google Sites for
ePortfolios
Teaching with ePortfolios signals a program
commitment to teaching reflection as an
enduring academic value.
Reflection, or the ability to independently assess one’s status
in relationship to a learning experience, is bound up with the
act of writing. Furthermore, the ability to self-reflect is an
increasingly essential skill as the process of higher education
becomes more and more heterogeneous and fragmented, with
more interdisciplnarity, multiple institutions, and multiple
teaching and learning settings. Teaching reflection as a
program value will not be easy, as most of our students have
not experienced it as an education goal. We will have to grow
in terms of recognizing what constitutes authentic and
valuable assessment; ePortfolios implicitly challenge us to
examine some of our more negative assumptions about
whether or not students learn at all in our classrooms.

11. Benefits: Google Sites for
ePortfolios
ePortfolios signal a power shift
toward student-centered learning.
Though “student-centered learning” has become a
cliché such over-generalizations draw their power from
an understanding that our students need to be more
involved in deciding what is studied, how it is studied,
and what learning is significant in relationship to class
goals. This does not mean that we are surrendering our
role as teachers. Rather, it acknowledges that students
experience more meaningful learning and are more apt
to keep and apply what they learn when they are
invited to help select, in a dialogue with their teachers,
what activities they will engage in to improve their
understanding of course content.

12. Benefits: Google Sites for
ePortfolios
ePortfolios offer flexibility in
deciding what counts as proof of
learning.
We would miss a valuable opportunity if we incorporated ePortfolios
into the program and then asked students to write a blue book final
exam in proctored classrooms for summative assessment. Instead, we
should explore the freedom that ePortfolios allow us in terms of
creating writing assignments to fulfill our course outcomes. For
example: ePortfolios allow us to assign, integrate, and assess shorter
pieces of writing as opposed to the traditional academic essay; for
example, what would a writing assignment of tweets, over a longer
period of time, on a substantial question, look like in a composition
classroom? These types of literacies are relevant to the world where
our students will apply their writing skills from our classrooms, and
employing ePortfolios for assessment allows students to assemble
writing of differing lengths, formats, and purposes as evidence of
advancement toward course goals.

13. Google Sites for ePortfolios
• Adoption of technology, and/or Google Sites
• Teaching students how to use reflection
properly in the academic context – no
“schmooze” or “puffery”
• Making space for ePortfolios within your
existing curriculum
• Moving away from testing on specific content
to assessing outcomes with reflection
• Reading and grading ePortfolios

14. Google Sites for ePortfolios
Resources for Google Sites
http://cwr.olemiss.edu/for-cwr-
teachers/resources/portfolios/eportfolio-
support/

15. Writing with Wikipedia
• How one can use Wikipedia in the classroom?
Basic Model:
1. Students master some aspect of your course content
2. Students learn the basics of Wikipedia
3. Students evaluate the presence of your course content
on Wikipedia
4. Students dialogue with Wikipedia editing community and
propose edits to that course content
5. Students make edits
6. Students reflect on how this helped to master course
outcomes

16. Writing with Wikipedia
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schoo
l_and_university_projects/2003-
2008_past_projects#Columbus_State_Universit
y_.28Spring_2008.29

17. Benefits: Teaching with
Wikipedia
• Students write for a “real world” audience
• Students transition from information
consumers to information producers
• Shifts your teaching role from “sage on the
stage” to “guide by the side”

18. Challenges: Teaching with
Wikipedia
• High risk, high reward strategy
• Some trolls in Wikipedia editing community
• Some students find it to be too much pressure
to write accurately about course content
• More chaos in the classroom

19. Writing with Wikipedia
• How to find out more
• Wikipedia Education Program
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education
_program
• Wikipedia Schools and Universities Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and
_university_projects

20. Multimodal Writing with Google
Sites
• http://cwr.olemiss.edu/for-cwr-
teachers/resources/o-multimodality/

21. More Resources
http://cwr.olemiss.edu/
cummings@olemiss.edu