Choose a media format based on what you hope to accomplish. A decision to compose with digital tools or to work in environments such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram should be based on what these media offer you. An electronic tool may support your project in ways that conventional printed texts simply cannot — and that’s the reason to select it. Various media writing options are described in the following table.

Use social networks and blogs to create communities. You know, of course, that Facebook and Twitter have transformed the way people share their lives and ideas. Social networks such as these are vastly more interactive versions of the online exchanges hosted by groups or individuals on blogs — which typically focus on topics such as politics, news, sports, technology, and entertainment. Social networks and blogs integrate comments, images, videos, and links in various ways; they are constantly updated, most are searchable, and some are archived.

College courses might use social networks and blogs to spur discussion of class materials, to distribute information, and to document research activities: Students in courses often set up their own social media groups. When networking or blogging is part of a course assignment, understand the ground rules. Instructors often require a defined number of postings/comments of a specific length. Participate regularly by reading and commenting on other students’ posts; by making substantive comments of your own on the assigned topic; and by contributing relevant images, videos, and links.

Keep your academic postings focused, title them descriptively, and make sure they reflect the style of the course — most likely informal, but not quite as colloquial as public online groups. Pay attention to grammar and mechanics too. Avoid the vitriol you may encounter on national sites: Remember that anyone — from your mother to a future employer — might read your remarks.

Create Web sites to share information. Not long ago, building Web sites was at the leading edge of technological savvy in the classroom. Today, social networks, blogs, and wikis are far more efficient vehicles for academic communication. Still, Web sites remain useful because of their capacity to organize large amounts of text and information online. A Web site you create for a course might report research findings or provide a portal to information on a complex topic.

When creating a site with multiple pages, plan early on how to organize that information; the structure will depend on your purpose and audience. A simple site with sequential information (e.g., a photo-essay) might lead readers through items one by one. More complicated sites may require a complex, hierarchical structure, with materials organized around careful topic divisions. The more comprehensive the site, the more deliberately you will need to map out its structure, allowing for easy navigation and growth.

Use wikis to collaborate with others. If you have ever looked at Wikipedia, you know what a wiki does: It enables a group to collaborate on the development of an ongoing online project — from a comprehensive encyclopedia to focused databases on just about any imaginable topic. Such an effort combines the knowledge of all its contributors, ideally making the whole greater than its parts.

In academic courses, instructors may ask class members to publish articles on an existing wiki — in which case you should read the site guidelines, examine its current entries and templates, and then post your item. More likely, though, you will use wiki software to develop a collaborative project for the course itself — bringing together research on a specific academic topic. A wiki might even be used for a service project in which participants gather useful information about nutrition, jobs, or arts opportunities for specific communities.

As always with electronic projects, you need to learn the software — which will involve not only uploading material to the wiki but also editing and developing texts that classmates have already placed there.

Make videos and podcasts to share information. With most cell phones now equipped with cameras, digital video has become the go-to medium these days for recording just about any event or for sharing ideas and information. In a sociology or government course, you might want to record important interviews; in a biology or engineering course, a video might be the best way to demonstrate a complex procedure. Software such as Movie Maker or iMovie can help you tell a story or make an argument; you can edit and mix digital scenes, refine the sound, add special effects and captions, and so on. If your subject is better served by animation, software such as Blender gives you different choices. You can construct nonnarrative kinds of video writing by combining text, film clips, still photos, and music using software such as Animoto, Soundslides, or Camtasia.

Podcasts remain a viable option for sharing downloadable audio or video files. Playable on various portable devices from MP3 players to tablets, podcasts are often published in series. Academic podcasts usually need to be scripted and edited. Producing a podcast is a two-step process. First you must record the podcast; then you need to upload it to a Web site for distribution. Software such as GarageBand can do both.

Use maps to position ideas. You use mapping services such as Google Maps whenever you search online for a restaurant, store, or hotel. The service quickly provides maps and directions to available facilities, often embellished with links, information, and images. Not surprisingly, Google Maps, the related Google Earth, and other mapping software are finding classroom applications.

Multimedia maps also make it possible to display information such as economic trends, movements of people, climate data, and other variables graphically and dynamically, using color, text, images, and video/audio clips to emphasize movement and change across space and time. Even literary texts can be mapped so that scholars or readers may track events or characters as they move in real or imaginary landscapes. Mapping thus becomes a vehicle for reporting and sharing information, telling personal stories, revealing trends, exploring causal relationships, or making arguments.

Use appropriate digital formats. Digital documents come in many forms, but you will use familiar word-processing, presentation, or spreadsheet software for most of your academic work. Compatibility is rarely an issue today when you move materials across computer platforms (PC to Mac) or download a presentation in a classroom for an oral report. Still, it never hurts to check ahead of time if, for example, you use Keynote or Prezi for a report rather than the more common PowerPoint.

Occasionally you need to save digital files in special formats. Sharing a file with someone using an older version of Word or Office may require saving a document in compatibility mode (.doc) rather than the now-standard .docx mode. Or moving across different applications may be easier if you use a plain text (.txt) or rich text format (.rtf) — in which case your document will lose some features, though the text will be preserved. When you want to share a document exactly as you wrote it and send it successfully across platforms, choose the .pdf mode. Files in .pdf form arrive exactly as you sent them, without any shifts in headings, alignments, or image locations; just as important, they cannot be easily altered.

Even if you have only a limited knowledge of differing image file formats (such as JPG, GIF, or TIFF), you probably understand that digital files come in varying sizes. The size of a digital-image file is directly related to the quality, or resolution, of the image. Attach a few high-resolution 26-megapixel photos to an e-mail and you’ll clog the recipient’s mailbox (or the e-mail will bounce back).

For most Web pages and online documents, compressed or lower-resolution images will be acceptable. On the other hand, if you intend to print an image —in a paper or brochure, for example — use the highest-resolution image (the greatest number of pixels) available to assure maximum sharpness and quality.

Edit and save digital elements. Nonprint media texts often require as much revising and editing as traditional written ones. In fact, the tools for manipulating video, audio, and still-image files are among the most remarkable accomplishments of the digital age. Even the simplest image-editing software, for example, enables users to adjust the tint, contrast, saturation, and sharpness of digital photographs or crop them as needed. If you are developing a podcast, an audio file can be tweaked a dozen ways using an audio editor like GarageBand or Audacity; such programs can also be used to create or refine musical clips. Comparable software is available for editing video clips.

Do keep careful tabs on any electronic content you collect for a project. Create a dedicated folder on your desktop, hard drive, or online storage and save each item with a name that will remind you where it came from. Keeping a printed record of images, with more detailed information about copyrights and sources, will pay dividends later, when you are putting your project or paper together and need to give proper credit to contributors.

Respect copyrights. The images you find, whether online or in print, belong to someone. You cannot use someone else’s property — photographs, Web sites, brochures, posters, magazine articles, and so on — for commercial purposes without permission. You may use a reasonable number of images in academic papers, but you must be careful not to go beyond “fair use,” especially for any work you put online. Search the term “academic fair use” online for detailed guidelines. Be prepared, too, to document images in academic research papers.