About... 
Save paper! Expand the audience for your aspiring authors! Make meaningful use of technology! Allow us to beautifully showcase your student writing online! Join the DCA!
More than twenty years ago Donald Graves published Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, setting off a revolution in writing instruction as he and his disciples at the University of New Hampshire published research studies and practical applications that demonstrated the art of teaching writing as the craft of writers. The result was a new generation of teachers who employed the "writing workshop" model in supporting all students to find their own author's voice.
The Digital Community of Authors (DCA) is built upon this pedagogy; that all students have their own native voice which can be developed by generating a variety of writing topics, drawing on personal experience, writing, conferencing, editing, revising and eventually publishing their work. Twenty years ago this meant dedicating a corner of your classroom to hard-copy publishing supplies. Not true here at the DCA! Publishing takes place online - right here on the web site. And with one Internet address students can have peers, family and friends from around the globe celebrate their writing!
Another feature of the Digital Community of Authors is the opportunity for feedback from our editor-in-residence, Mallory McKenzie! Through the DCA students can send Mallory drafts of their work in Word (.doc) or Rich Text (.rtf) format and she will offer practical suggestions for further developing their work. It's like a writing conference that takes place above and beyond the writing workshop you conduct in your classroom!
The steps to join the DCA are simple:
1) Complete the online registration form for your student or students
2) Set up a writing workshop in your classroom
3) Make use of the resources on the DCA site as students work through the writing process
4) Send drafts to our editor-in-residence as writing is ready for feedback
5) Submit final drafts (including original art work) to the DCA when they are ready to be published
6) Receive the Internet address for the published work so that it can be viewed online!
We hope you'll join us in the Digital Community of Authors project!
Further reading:
Donald Graves' Tips on the Teaching of Writing
http://www.donaldgraves.org/teach_writing.aspNCTE: What Research Says about Writing
http://www.ncte.org/prog/writing/research/
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