RM Winter 2017 FINAL

62 / 72

Reading Matters
Technology Matters
| 62| Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |
discuss how to cite modes other than text, such as images, which
were prevalent in the students’ posters. Part of this discussion
led to introducing students to websites that would help them
use images form the Internet without violating copyright law
(Hicks, 2009), such as morgueFile ).
Students then worked over several class periods developing their
own Glogster EDU posters of their chosen social cause, knowing
this was serving both as a way to brainstorm their arguments
and as a part of their eventual PSA website as this Glogster EDU
poster would eventually be embedded in the students’ websites.
Tool. In order for students to create online, multimodal
posters of their arguments, we used Glogster EDU (edu.glogster.
com). Glogster EDU is an online poster service that offers teachers
student accounts that can be monitored through a closed platform.
Teachers can create an account, establish student accounts,
and monitor what students create and share on these accounts.
We chose this site because it is free for teachers (though only
on a limited, trial basis) and enables multimodality. Students
can include text, graphics, images, audio clips, and/or video
clips in their posters. They can also design the background,
colors, and layout of their posters. Other affordances of Glogster
EDU are that it allows students to easily share their posters
with other students and can be embedded into websites. In
addition, Glogster EDU has a Glogpedia (“Glogpedia,” 2014) that
allows teachers to provide students with multiple examples
of others’ work. Disadvantages of Glogster EDU include its
functionality depending upon the Internet access of a school
and students remembering their assigned login information.
Students may also become frustrated trying to integrate video
into their posters depending upon established school filters.
Draft with PowerPoint and Google Slides
Writing process. Toulmin developed his model of argument
because we often do not write arguments with statements of
absolute truth as in Aristotle’s syllogism; instead, we deal with
evidence that is often questioned and must be defended through
a warrant (Hillocks, 2010; Toulmin, 1958/2003). To help students
conceptualize these concepts of argument-claims, evidence,
and warrants—and realize that these may be conveyed with
text, but also with other modes, students created a photo-essay
of their arguments. To help scaffold students’ writing, we gave
them a model of how they might structure each slide-using
claim, evidence, and warrant. The claim served as the title for
each slide, followed by one picture, which served as evidence.
Below the picture, each slide could contain a warrant, explaining
how the picture supported the claim described in the respective
title. However, such scaffolding should be provided with the
wariness that although such strategies can help students learn,
such structure may also inhibit creativity (Bailey & Carroll, 2010).
Tool. We used PowerPoint as it is available on many school
computers and was available on the laptops the students used
for this project. The students were familiar with this technology
though were less familiar with creating the simple layout of
each slide and organizing the slides according to the elements
of argument. We recommended that students use a plain black
background to let their picture stand out against such a backdrop.
In addition, once the students used these photo-essays in their
final website, they changed their PowerPoint into a Google Slides
presentation by uploading it to Google Drive. Google Applications
is a free host of these Google applications, such as Google Slides
and Google Documents, available with a Google email account
( .
In the school where we were implementing this intervention,
each student had a Google email account associated with the
school district through which Google Drive and the suite of
Google applications were available. This was another advantage
of choosing a Google Application, such as Google Slides, as each
student already had an account prior to this project. Changing the
PowerPoint to a Google Slides presentation allowed the students
to easily embed their photo-essay into the site and choose how
it would display once the viewer clicked on this particular aspect
of their website. Although students’ familiarity with PowerPoint
was an advantage, the students were unfamiliar with uploading
PowerPoints to Google Drive and converting them to Google Slides,
and we learned that it was important to give students explicit
instruction on these technical aspects, reaffirming discussion of
the flawed concept of the digital native and digital immigrant
(Prensky, 2001) and that students may not be familiar with
using technology when that use is related to content creation
and manipulation of multimedia (Bennett et al., 2008).
Publish with Google Sites
Writing process. The final step of this multimodal argument
writing project was to publish a PSA using a website. We gave
intentionally limited requirements for what students had to
include on these sites. We taught each student how to embed
in their website both their Glogster EDU poster and their photo-
essay. Other than these two requirements, the students were
encouraged to use the multiliteracies concept of design to think
of how they could arrange their site to convey the message of
their arguments. Students had to consider not only the content
of their message and its intended audience, but they also had
to reflect upon design concepts: background of the site, colors
of fonts, amount of pages, links to include, and amount of text
on each page. Because websites afford such freedom of design,
students may need to be reminded to focus upon the purpose
for their arguments rather than getting lost in the affordances of
the technology-the tool should serve the content (Hicks, 2009).
Tool. The tool we chose for the students’ publication of
their arguments was Google Sites
sites/overview.html). When we were designing this project, we
wanted a platform that could house multimedia as we knew
the students would be using multimodal, digital tools at each
stage of their argumentative writing process. Thus, we chose
a website for this affordance. In deciding upon which website
platform to use, we chose Google Sites for several reasons.
The most compelling reason was that the students already
had Google email accounts established through their school
district, and Google Sites is designed to integrate other Google
Applications. In addition,Google Sites is a free technology, has
multiple templates, does not require knowledge of coding,