Final "Portfolio" Reflection #4

Of everything we've covered in class, what are two examples of things that I will definitely use in my teaching?

My final project, which I will probably post next, should answer this question clearly, but I can summarize that here.

First, I will definitely be assigning an "interactive presentation" of some sort, but for which assignment, or using what topic, I am not yet sure. For this, students will need to use PowerPoint, KeyNote, Google Docs, SlideRocket, SlideBoom, SlideShare, VoiceThread, or something similar. They will not be able to "talk at us," and the criteria for slide composition will be strict -- slides will definitely not be "text dumps." And I think my colleagues in the Speech Department will love me for teaching this unit; I think they already require the use of PowerPoint in student speeches.

Wait, Here's An Assignment Idea:

I could have groups of students (3-4 per group) do "research" to look for and analyze images or portrayals of contemporary college students in the media--print media (books, newspapers, magazines) and online media (websites, podcasts, blogs, video, etc.). The groups could then present their "media" (and their "remixes"?) and their analyses using one of the presentation applications mentioned above. Ooo, I think I like this idea!

O.K., Now I'm Back:

Second, I will definitely be rethinking "peer review" in my courses. I might do one, the first one of the term, the "traditional" way, in class, face-to-face, in pairs, trios, or groups of four. Let them experience it, and then really talk about it afterwards--"deconstruct" it and evaluate it. After that, I'll probably have them try Google Docs, since Professor Beach mentioned in his midterm evaluation of my blog that it will be the easiest, as opposed to using a wiki or a blog. And "training" students for peer review is always important--training and modeling--so I will need to rethink how I will present and have them carry out the peer review.

An "Aside":

(Is peer review going the way of citing sources ... in the digital world? It seems like citing sources has become a lot more informal ... "hey, just create a link, that's good enough." Is peer review merging with collaborative writing? Instead of just responding to a "text," or inserting comments into a "text," are students going to start just "playing around" with the text themselves, in an attempt to help out the writer? Is this bad? But what if the assignment is not a collaborative writing assignment? Or is all writing becoming collaborative? And do we need to start re-envisioning peer review to be something else?)

O.K., Now I'm Back:

Third, I will definitely introduce "Bubbl.us" as a prewriting and an organizational tool!

Fourth, I will definitely have a class wiki, but as you've read in other posts, I'm not sure yet what I'll have students contribute to that.

In Conclusion:

I am excited about all this! I'm interested to see how my students will react to all this. I'm interested to know how many have already done things like this. (And that's kind of what my final project was getting at. So I suppose I should end here and embed that project in the next post.)

Final "Portfolio" Reflection #3

Will I have my students keep and present a final portfolio of their coursework? Yes, definitely.

How will I have my students keep and present their final portfolios? Their individual blogs? The course wiki? Individual wikis? The "eFolio" from the State of Minnesota. Ugh! I don't know. Yet. Perhaps I should let them choose? Or would that cause too many headaches?

What will I have my students include in the portfolio? The answer to this one is easier. Our English Department at Anoka Ramsey Community College already has a portfolio process and committee -- and I have participated in this process in the past, but not consistently. If my memory is correct, the current portfolio process for English 1121, our college-level first-year writing course, asks for the following:

1. A cover letter or introductory piece, which also serves as the reflective piece.
2. An essay of the student's choice, preferably expository or persuasive, with all drafts from first to final.
3. The argumentative research paper, with all drafts and with all cited research sources.
4. An in-class essay.

A student can, of course, include more, but these are the minimum requirements.

I see now that some things are going to have to be modified if I'm going to have my students do this "digitally," especially the last two items.

For item #3, including all cited research sources shouldn't be too difficult -- most of this should be possible with hyperlinks. And, if a source is not "online," hopefully we'll be able to attach PDF files somehow. And, even better, I ask my students to highlight in their sources the material they cite in their paper, and they should be able to use the highlighter feature in Adobe for this! If nothing else, I can have my students do what I had to do for Professor O'Brien's "Struggling Adolescent Readers" course: they can send to me a compressed/zipped folder containing all their documents.

For item #4, this will be trickier. The intention behind the in-class essay is to see what a student can do on his or her own, without multiple drafts and without peer feedback. Partly, it exhibits a student's writing fluency, and partly it is a plagiarism check. To have students write this on a computer, or online, does present some challenges to both of these purposes, since blog posts or Word documents can be easily changed, after the posting or initial draft, and it is pretty much impossible to prevent this ... and useless, hopeless, unnecessary, etc. ... to "police" it.

Including other digital projects -- such as VoiceThreads or SlideRockets or YouTube videos -- should also be easy. Hyperlinks can be created and copied, or HTML code can be embedded.

Ultimately, for me, the first decision seems to be the "form" the portfolio will take ... blog, wiki, or eFolio?

And, ultimately, for the students, the reflective piece will hopefully be the most important.

Final "Portfolio" Reflection #1

Well, it looks like I've written 35 or 36 posts since I began this blog back in September! Wow! Time sure has flown. And, I can't believe I've written that much. I had figured 1-2 a week for the 15-week semester, which would be about 15-30. Well, I guess it's close. (Too many "wells"? I'm still not sure if I've found my "tone" or "voice" yet!)

The first major thing that comes to mind when reviewing my posts is something Alyssa R. said to me in class a few weeks ago: "These blogs sure are public." When I asked her what she meant, she replied that someone from SlideRocket had found her blog, and her post about SlideRocket, and they had left a comment for her. Like me, I think she thought no one would find these blogs except our classmates. But someone had found hers! Then, just a day or so later, I saw a comment to my podcasting post, and Chuck Tomasi (one of the co-authors of Podcasting for Dummies) had left a comment thanking me for using and mentioning Podcasting for Dummies in my blog! Then, a few days after that, the SlideRocket people had also found my SlideRocket presentation and blog post, and had left a message as well. Of course, it's all about recognizing "product placement" and advertising, but it's also "cool" to think that these blogs are "out there, and lovin' every minute of it," as Kramer once said on Seinfeld.

My best blog post? Maybe the two posts about American Literature, and comparing my course to a course Donald Ross is currently teaching. But why are these the best? Maybe because they were not assigned for my Digital Writing class. (Which is where we want our students to also end up, eventually.) But also maybe because I'm really enjoying my sabbatical and having the time to do things like this, to take this Digital Writing course, and to sit in on another course that I enjoy teaching. So, I don't know if the two posts are necessarily "good" because of the writing itself but because I enjoyed the creation of them, the experiences which led up to them.

Likewise, my "worst" blog post ... perhaps the one(s) having to do with podcasting ... because I struggled, at first, and partly throughout, with the podcasting activity itself, with figuring out Audacity, with take after take, with finding music, with editing. But by the time I was looking for music, and editing, and using the envelope tool, I was actually starting to have a bit of fun.

So that may be the "key" for me, the criterion that I would use for evaluating my blog posts: Which activities gave me the most frustration and struggle, and which activities were fun (or even became fun as time moved along)?

Frustrations:

• Podcasting (recording and editing audio) ... the first three-quarters of it
• Vlogging (recording and editing video) ... I don't actually consider what I did to be a vlog ... OK, it's definitely NOT a vlog, I do know that ... and it took a long time ... but again, the fun came later, when I got the "hang" of iMovie ... and it was fun to use video of my cat and creatively connect it to writing ... and it was fun to actually post something to YouTube!
  

Enjoyments:

• Creating the WritingMinnesota wiki
• Bubbl.us
• Flickr SlideShow
• VoiceThread (x2)
• SlideRocket Presentation
  

These were all "new" tools for me, they were fun, I had to be somewhat creative (although I'm not creative at all), and I tried to always connect it to my teaching, although often in somewhat goofy ways. But, hey, it's a start ... and I might even have the courage to show these to my students as "rough models."

And that's what I have to keep doing: reflecting on HOW AND WHY I might have my students use these tools. Yes, I want them to have fun, to be motivated and engaged, but I also want them to be writing and to be improving their writing. And I want to be confident that these tools are indeed helping them to do that.

Analyzing My SlideRocket Presentation

A week or so ago, I posted my SlideRocket presentation, and at that time I promised to add more commentary later. Here's that commentary! Better late than never?

SlideRocket is a lot like PowerPoint, or KeyNote (on the Mac), I'm told, and there are other "presentation sites" out there on the web, such as Google Docs, VoiceThread, SlideBoom, or SlideShare. I've used VoiceThread already, so I thought I'd try SlideRocket.

An interesting assignment idea might be to have students compare-and-contrast, and evaluate, two different presentation tools, and then create a presentation about it!?! I've just done an informal survey, and students are reporting that a "PowerPoint assignment" should definitely be a part of a college-writing class ... perhaps especially since they are already required to use PowerPoint in their required Speech class.

In creating these presentations, my digital writing professor asked us to make them "as interactive as possible," and then I missed the next class where he demonstrated some very interactive ones.

So, instead of using SlideRocket as a lecture/presentation tool where A LOT of information is given, using A LOT of bullet lists, I envisioned and created it for a discussion-based literature class, where discussion rather than lecture is the dominant mode. I wanted to use it to guide the in-class discussion, to give students things to think about, to activate their background knowledge(s), to explicitly elicit comments from them, and to move us forward. (So many times, discussions can stall. However, sometimes it is also good if discussions get off track, or even back up a bit. Can these presentation tools handle that?)

I think this presentation does a fairly good job, but it is definitely for an in-class discussion, where I (or someone else) would be "moderating" and perhaps even jotting notes on the whiteboard -- or somewhere else ... is there a digital tool for that? (There's got to be; it's just not on my radar yet.)

A classmate, Brent Eckhoff, told me about a presentation he designed, with the idea that students would view it, and interact with it, OUTSIDE of class. This is my next step.

Walt Whitman's Astronomer Poem

Here is my first attempt at "digital literature" or "digital storytelling." I'm sure it does not exactly meet what was asked of me, since here I use Walt Whitman's words mixed with some "Creative Commons" images from Flickr. I'm sure I was supposed to use my own photos or images, and my own writing, to create "this"--a digital poem or story. But I had fun doing it. And I'm sure my students might have fun doing something like this as well.

But what's the point? Why did I do this? (Other than to complete the terms of an assignment?) And why would I have my students do this? (Other than to complete the terms of an assignment?) What would be the purpose? Who would be the audience?

Would including a project like this in my course challenge my students academically in some way? (The technology challenged me a little bit, but the concept of the VoiceThread came to me almost immediately, and I had fun doing it.) Or would it be only for fun, a new way to look at and think about literature? A pop-culture approach to American Literature?

Would doing a project like this give my students more insight into a literary text? (For me, the insight might come in the way of requiring them to choose the "best" images for the project. It was impossible for me to find "applause in the lecture-room." I guess I could have "staged" it--and students might have fun doing these stagings. But, I think I did pretty well with "the mystical moist night-air," when I thought that was going to be the hardest phrase to capture.)

I definitely see much potential here, but like all the other tools I've been introduced to so far in this class, I'm still falling short of brilliant ideas and insights for incorporating them into my courses. Maybe it'll come to me later ...?

A Brief VideoThread Survey of American Literature

Here is my first experiment with composing "digital literature" using VoiceThread. The images are all from Flickr and are licensed under "Creative Commons."

This VoiceThread is an audio and video tour of some of the writers I cover in the two-semester course sequence of American Literature: ENGL 2230 and ENGL 2235 at Anoka Ramsey Community College.