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background to let their picture stand out against such a backdrop. In addition, once the students used these photo-essays in their final website, they changed their PowerPoint into a Google Slides presentation by uploading it to Google Drive . Google Applications is a free host of these Google applications, such as Google Slides and Google Documents , available with a Google email account (https://www.google.com/edu/products/productivity-tools/). In the school where we were implementing this intervention, each student had a Google email account associated with the school district through which Google Drive and the suite of Google applications were available. This was another advantage of choosing a Google Application, such as Google Slides , as each student already had an account prior to this project. Changing the PowerPoint to a Google Slides presentation allowed the students to easily embed their photo-essay into the site and choose how it would display once the viewer clicked on this particular aspect of their website. Although students’ familiarity with PowerPoint was an advantage, the students were unfamiliar with uploading PowerPoints to Google Drive and converting them to Google Slides , and we learned that it was important to give students explicit instruction on these technical aspects, reaffirming discussion of the flawed concept of the digital native and digital immigrant (Prensky, 2001) and that students may not be familiar with using technology when that use is related to content creation and manipulation of multimedia (Bennett et al., 2008). Publish with Google Sites Writing process. The final step of this multimodal argument writing project was to publish a PSA using a website. We gave intentionally limited requirements for what students had to include on these sites. We taught each student how to embed in their website both their Glogster EDU poster and their photo- essay. Other than these two requirements, the students were encouraged to use the multiliteracies concept of design to think of how they could arrange their site to convey the message of their arguments. Students had to consider not only the content of their message and its intended audience, but they also had to reflect upon design concepts: background of the site, colors of fonts, amount of pages, links to include, and amount of text on each page. Because websites afford such freedom of design, students may need to be reminded to focus upon the purpose for their arguments rather than getting lost in the affordances of the technology-the tool should serve the content (Hicks, 2009). Tool. The tool we chose for the students’ publication of their arguments was Google Sites (http://www.google.com/ sites/overview.html). When we were designing this project, we wanted a platform that could house multimedia as we knew the students would be using multimodal, digital tools at each stage of their argumentative writing process. Thus, we chose a website for this affordance. In deciding upon which website platform to use, we chose Google Sites for several reasons. The most compelling reason was that the students already had Google email accounts established through their school district, and Google Sites is designed to integrate other Google Applications. In addition, Google Sites is a free technology, has multiple templates, does not require knowledge of coding,

discuss how to cite modes other than text, such as images, which were prevalent in the students’ posters. Part of this discussion led to introducing students to websites that would help them use images form the Internet without violating copyright law (Hicks, 2009), such as morgueFile (http://www.morguefile.com/). Students then worked over several class periods developing their own Glogster EDU posters of their chosen social cause, knowing this was serving both as a way to brainstorm their arguments and as a part of their eventual PSA website as this Glogster EDU poster would eventually be embedded in the students’ websites. Tool. In order for students to create online, multimodal posters of their arguments, we used Glogster EDU (edu.glogster. com). Glogster EDU is an online poster service that offers teachers student accounts that can be monitored through a closed platform. Teachers can create an account, establish student accounts, and monitor what students create and share on these accounts. We chose this site because it is free for teachers (though only on a limited, trial basis) and enables multimodality. Students can include text, graphics, images, audio clips, and/or video clips in their posters. They can also design the background, colors, and layout of their posters. Other affordances of Glogster EDU are that it allows students to easily share their posters with other students and can be embedded into websites. In addition, Glogster EDU has a Glogpedia (“Glogpedia,” 2014) that allows teachers to provide students with multiple examples of others’ work. Disadvantages of Glogster EDU include its functionality depending upon the Internet access of a school and students remembering their assigned login information. Students may also become frustrated trying to integrate video into their posters depending upon established school filters. Draft with PowerPoint and Google Slides Writing process. Toulmin developed his model of argument because we often do not write arguments with statements of absolute truth as in Aristotle’s syllogism; instead, we deal with evidence that is often questioned and must be defended through a warrant (Hillocks, 2010; Toulmin, 1958/2003). To help students conceptualize these concepts of argument-claims, evidence, and warrants—and realize that these may be conveyed with text, but also with other modes, students created a photo-essay of their arguments. To help scaffold students’ writing, we gave them a model of how they might structure each slide-using claim, evidence, and warrant. The claim served as the title for each slide, followed by one picture, which served as evidence. Below the picture, each slide could contain a warrant, explaining how the picture supported the claim described in the respective title. However, such scaffolding should be provided with the wariness that although such strategies can help students learn, such structure may also inhibit creativity (Bailey & Carroll, 2010). Tool. We used PowerPoint as it is available on many school computers and was available on the laptops the students used for this project. The students were familiar with this technology though were less familiar with creating the simple layout of each slide and organizing the slides according to the elements of argument. We recommended that students use a plain black

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