Author: Julia Hewitt

Julia Hewitt reads and writes with her high school students at Cabot School in Cabot, Vermont, where she's been a mostly one-person English department since 1985. Her second professional home is the National Writing Project, with which she's been affiliated since 1997. Since 2003, she has served as co-director of the Vermont site, the Green Mountain Writing Project, teaching numerous graduate Writing Project courses at the University of Vermont, including the Summer Institute for teachers of writing. Julia earned a BA in English at Connecticut College in 1983, and in 2017 graduated from Goddard College with her Master of Arts in Education. She is particularly interested in digital composition and the ways it provides an authentic audience for student work. When not engaged in academic pursuits, she enjoys knitting, making baskets, and playing her Celtic harp with the New Hampshire Highland Harp Ensemble and as a volunteer with Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice.

Why digital composition matters

why digital composition matters I’d like you to think back to your days as a student. What kinds of writing did you do? Who read it? What made it important to you? And what made it important to the world?

If you’re like most people, you’re probably drawing a blank right now. Some of today’s students, though, can clearly articulate just how and why their writing is important. And we don’t mean writing as you might imagine, but rather digital composition: digital stories, digital portfolios, documentary films, and of course, podcasts. For each of these, there is a real audience, one beyond the more typical audience of one, the teacher.

Continue reading “Beyond the audience of one”