Scholars such as Wysocki, Welch, Yancey, Lunsford, and Hocks rightly suggest that writing teachers have a great deal of disciplinary expertise in studying and teaching composing as a social/material act, which they can bring to the digital classroom. As we know from our experience with print, just because students in our print-based classrooms have the technical knowledge to produce word-processed essays, this does NOT mean that they have the rhetorical knowledge necessary to consider critically the social, ethical, and material implications of the composing choices they make. Likewise, as Hocks points out, many students have technical knowledge to blend modalities, but not rhetorical tools necessary to accomplish this blending in effective way. “Students don’t realize the screen is rhetorical” (640).If we remember that composing in multiple modes is as rhetorical as composing in print, rhetoric becomes the best place to begin for an answer to “how do I teach this?”

From there, many authors offer overviews of their own digital and multimodal teaching experience (Anderson; George; Palmeri; Sheppard). Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition by Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc and Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers edited by Cindy Selfe are excellent starting points for practical classroom exercises.