Prezi

I might be becoming a Prezi addict, and while I'm a bit concerned with this, I want to share a few Prezis I have recently created for "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents" by Keith Grant Davie and "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning" by Christina Haas and Linda Flower.

Copy of Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning on Prezi

I'm currently working on a second Prezi- this one is still under construction. If anyone has any advice about conducting a mach courtroom, I want to hear how you did it.

Keith Grant Davie on Prezi

Is anyone else using Prezi? Will you post your Prezi here?

Writing Center consultation write-up

Hello everyone!

One of our consultants gave me permission to post this reflection based on one of her recent consultations. Although every consultation is different, her post is an example of ways UWC sessions can help students with global issues (even though students say they are coming for help with "grammar"). --Kim

Consultation to Share

On Wednesday this week, a student came in with a paper for her ENC 1102 class. The assignment asked students to watch a documentary in class and to write a paper analyzing the documentary’s main point and the effectiveness of the director’s use of logos, ethos, and pathos, in showcasing this point to the audience. The documentary that this student watched focused on the surveillance procedures of the national government. While she had a 2-page single-spaced paper (in other words, the 4 double-spaced pages she was required to write), the paper was mostly summary and lists of people who had appeared as interviewees in the film. When I asked the student what her main concerns were she said grammar and sentence structure.

At this point I was a little worried and overwhelmed. She had already sent the paper to her mother and grandmother, and they had told her that it was “a decent paper but a little rambling.” Reading through her paper, I had noticed several grammatical errors (comma splices, fragments, tense shifts, and subject-verb and pronoun-antecedent agreement). I wanted to address the student’s concerns about grammar since they were so evident, but I knew that a paper full of summary would never suffice in a Composition 2 class. I mentioned that I had noticed a few things while reading through and asked if she had had any trouble inserting analysis of logos, ethos, and pathos into her paper while writing. She agreed that she had struggled with organizing her thoughts and mentioned that her mother and grandmother often tell her that her papers are “all over the place.” Seizing on this comment, I informed the student that I had the same reaction.

From there, I was able to point out the four sentences of analysis that the paper had and to help the student develop her thesis. Her original “thesis” had not been stated clearly or supported at all by the body of the paper. After talking through the ways she could analyze the film, I suggested a prewriting strategy (one that I often use) to her. I told her to take out a sheet of paper and write down everything that came to her mind when thinking about this assignment and then to go back with different colors of highlighters and group her thoughts into sections. From there she should be able to see the basic structure of her paper and to understand her argument a little bit better. She agreed that she liked that idea.

Once she had a better grip on which elements of her paper she could keep, how to structure the body, and what her thesis was, I turned to grammar because she had mentioned it as a concern. Focusing on the few sentences that she was planning on keeping, I pointed out some of the major problems that had become themes throughout the paper. I told her to keep an eye out for similar issues in her revisions then suggested that she return to the UWC after writing her next draft.

Technology in the Classroom

I'm really interested in ways that we can incorporate technology into the classroom. Perhaps it's just a pedagogical fad to explore the vagaries of the Twitterati in the classroom...but I don't think so. (This article, which I have my students read, articulates the debate nicely.)

I realize people frequently express fears that the Facebook generation will not be able to engage in the sustained critical thinking that academic writing requires. Instead of decrying technology's ill effects on our students, however, I think that we should help students to use it effectively. We teach rhetorical situation, so it seems only natural that we should help our students to understand how the constraints of writing in an online environment effect the way that their message is perceived. Additionally, research (and my anecdotal experience) suggests that technology helps increase students' motivation to write. I know students don't have to be excited about a class in order to learn something, but it sure does make life easier.

So, in light of Joe's comments on borrowing, I thought I would share some ways that I've used technology in the classroom this semester, in case any of you deem them worthy of borrowing. I use  a blog to keep in touch with my students. I post activities, reading questions, articles I come across, useful links, and sometimes instructions for the next class period. I even post polls that students can respond to anonymously, so that I can get feedback about what I do in class. (The current poll is about how useful an in-class activity on evaluating sources was.) I know I'm not the only one in the department who uses a blog, so please share your experiences if you use blogging in other ways.

I have my students blog as well , not only so they can start to understand how to write persuasively in a digital environment, but also so that they can start to understand research as a conversation. I have my ENC1102 students divided into blog groups of about five students each, and they are supposed to read each other's posts and respond to each other's ideas. (Some do this better than others.) They learn to incorporate images, videos, and links into their posts to capture their audience's interest. We also talk about the similarity between hyperlinks and citations, so students can understand that a works cited page is really just a way of "linking" readers to other sources.

I've also used a Facebook page this semester to discuss good writing and constructs with my ENC1101 students. They posted responses about their preconceptions of writing early in the semester, and now we're using scholarly research to analyze those ideas and correct misconceptions.

My ENC1101 students were having a difficult time understanding the idea of argument as conversation, so I used ToonDoo to create a comic strip illustrating an argument they could make in their first paper. The first panel uses students' actual responses on our Facebook page, the second panel includes a quote from Joseph Williams to refute the students' ideas, and the third panel includes ideas from outside sources to complicate students' construct of grammar even further. After showing my students this cartoon, I tried having them draw their own comic strip in class to demonstrate their arguments...but I'm still not sure if that quite worked. Trial and error.

By hwayne | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

Finally, I've started to use Prezi to create presentations for my students. It's free, it's pretty simple (there's a quick video tutorial), and it's a more visually appealing alternative to PowerPoint. Plus, your presentations are stored on their website, and you can give your students the link so they can access them whenever they want. You can also embed your Prezis in a blog, like the one I have below on reading scholarly articles.

How do you use technology in the classroom? Please share your innovative methods in the comments!

How to Read Scholarly Research Articles on Prezi

On Borrowing

This semester I have been borrowing many ideas from different faculty members:

1)Heather: I had my students write their expectations for me (the instructor), themselves (the students), peers (each other), and the overall course. I then complied this and attached it as an addendum for the syllabus. It worked very well and helped build a student centered approach.

2)Lindee: To build teams and precision in writing, I broke students into groups and distributed twenty Legos to each group. As they built a structure, they had to write the instructions for how to build it. After they built the structure, one member form the team photographed it with a mobile device. Then, each group passed the instructions along with the blocks to the next group with the hope that their instructions allowed the next group to recreate the structure. Through three classes, it became very evident that visual aids provided the best chance for success. This seems to reinforce the adage- a picture is worth a thousand words.

3)Laurie: To break down constructs I asked students to list as many cliques as they could remember from high school. After we came up with the list (jocks, nerds, Goths, cheerleaders, sluts- to name a few), we labeled characteristics for each group. Next, I asked students to think about students who may have been part of these groups but didn’t fit with the characteristics for that group. Looking at constructs in this way really helped my students understand what constructs are.
4) Matt: To brainstorm about constructs I used Matt’s best practices exercise three. This exercise afforded students multiple viewpoints which helped them see differing perspectives.
5) One Minute Paper—I think this one came from Adele, but Laurie may have been the originator of it. I have used the one minute paper many times to gage how well students are grasping the material.

I have plans to borrow much more for the rest of my teaching days, and I want to invite everyone to share what it is that we all really love doing. The ideas I borrowed from others helped me do a better job. Thank you! I obtained the borrowed plans from best practices and by talking to others in passing. We are all too busy to talk with everyone about what we are doing, so we now have a space to blog about our classroom practices.

This blog space is a place where we can share our ideas with one another. Laurie, Lindee, Heather, Adele and Matt have reached beyond their own classes to influence students in my class. (I am also using more stuff from best practices later in the term). At a clip of teaching for thirty years and reaching 200 students per year (a 4x4 block), an instructor might reach 6,000 people. By sharing ideas and helping other instructors become better, an instructor can reach tens of thousands more students.

Please come and blog here. Talk about what you are doing in your class and what is really working well for you.


Joseph