Digital Publishing with Decker Colony Students

In my role as Literacy with ICT Teacher Leader for PWSD, I am fortunate to work in lots of great classrooms.   One class that I have worked with recently is Mr. Elias Wipf's Grade 7-9 ELA class at Decker Colony School.   This group of students decided to tackle a special writing project this year.   Their goal was to collaboratively write short stories and publish them digitally.   Their books are now available online and they have printed a copy for their school library.   The quality of their work is absolutely exceptional, so I'd encourage you to check out the books using the links below!

The Fish Said by Grace and Carrie Waldner

The 3 Little Swines by Daniel and Alex Waldner

Unsuspecting by Renae Wipf, Tamar Waldner, Adelheid Waldner and Natalya Waldner 

I have already written quite a bit about publishing digital books on this blog.  If you are interested in digital book creation, you can read more about the process in this post. You can also check out this post to see some more samples and read about why I think students should publish their writing.  A few things to note about the Decker Grades 7-9 books:

• Collaboration:  Students worked with their grade-level peers to write the stories.  They used a shared document (Google Doc) to write collaboratively.
• Planning: In addition to planning their stories, students also used a storyboard to plan the layout of their books.   Developing a storyboard allowed students to plan the illustrations they would need.   Having the storyboards helped students put their text and artwork together in the digital book by following the plan for which pages would contain text and which pages would contain illustrations. 
• Artwork:  The artwork included in these books is excellent!  The students developed their illustrations on paper and a combination of photographing and colour scanning was used to digitize the photos.  
• Revision: The shared documents made ongoing revision easier.   Students and teachers could read, re-read, edit and revise.  The writing in these books was revised and refined a number of times based on peer editing and teacher editing.