The Continuous Necessity to Adapt Technological Advances in Creating Significant Learning Environments

Creating my e-portfolio allowed me to experience firsthand the challenges my students would face while developing their Digital Writing Journals. I needed to explain the purpose of my project to my administrators to convey the essence of my innovative proposal—"What's my why?" Here are the main pillars of my why: Why — We believe that instilling in children the ability to write empowers them to articulate themselves clearly, analyze situations objectively, and communicate effectively within their community and the world at large. How—To do this, we create a significant blended-learning environment, set up a creative digital-writing rotating station for writing authentic digital journals, and give our young writers choice, ownership, and voice through an authentic learning opportunities (COVA) approach (Harapnuik et al., 2018). What—We prepare effective communicators who confidently interact and connect with others in this digital age by empowering their voices and expressing their ideas in writing on a digital platform.

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 Understanding by Design enabled us to plan with a clear end goal in mind. Learning facilitators and educators must design sessions to ensure success based on the desired performance outcomes. Understanding by Design (UbD) is a practical and valuable "backward" design framework. It assists educators in recognizing expected outcomes, establishing acceptable evidence for learning objectives, and progressively planning specific learning experiences and instruction to achieve the desired aim (Wiggings & McTighe, 2005). This approach helped us persuade our administrators to initiate a pilot group to assess its results.

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To make things more precise, I constructed Fink's Three-Column Table, which carefully displays the planned goals, activities, and assessments to ensure that students learn what the learning outcomes expect them to achieve. To improve the execution of Writing Digital Journals, I implemented The Four Disciplines of Execution and The Influencer Model, which are frameworks designed to refocus our efforts on making meaningful change by focusing first on the most critical challenges; as a leader, you must consciously focus on less so the team can accomplish goals in a more significant way (McChesney et al., 2021). All of this careful planning ensures that our language learners achieve significant linguistic output. Language output performance is essential to language development because it is crucial for students to acquire and refine their language skills, which support critical thinking (Swain, 1985). 

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Digital Writing Journals within a Blended Learning Environment feature four written composition samples created according to the Texas Department of Education's guidelines. These include personal narratives, reports on informational texts, expressions of opinions and arguments, and letters of correspondence, such as thank-you notes.

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To begin implementing our innovative proposal, we elaborated a Final Action Research Plan that led us to explore and present another alternative approach to writing composition for second graders. After presenting the results of our pilot group, we intend to continue training additional “learning facilitators” in our grade level who need to help their language learners improve their written expression in digital format. We have created a Professional Learning Plan to assist them in getting started and coach them throughout the school year to reflect on the results reached. This professional learning proposal aims to discuss with educators the benefits of combining the COVA (Harapnuik, 2018) and Blended Learning educational models for language proficiency and critical thinking development in our young language learners.