We must see group work as a component of a group project. The two are not necessarily distinct or different in my mind. Effective group work grows into a group project. In Janette Larson’s video, she distinguishes between group work and group projects in a helpful way, but one that I think I’m gonna push against ever so slightly. Whereas group work consists of low-stakes assignments that can be done quickly and in class, group projects are high-stakes assignments that require outside meetings and work. In my own classroom, this is largely how I have treated them up to this point, but, in OWcourses, I want to begin scaffolding major group projects through group work that adds pebbles to the bucket across the semester. Group work-projects, if you will. To help you imagine this, I want to brainstorm you through this collaborative work-project that I’ve been chomping at the bit to do: the Canonizing Climate Fiction working site.

The assignment is a semester long project that results in a class-curated website on climate fiction, or literature about climate change. This course website will do three things (which correspond to three/four assignments). I want it to be populated with critical blogs and essays written by students about the novels, poems, short stories, and films that we analyze in class. I want it to act like a Wikipedia on climate fiction. I want it to have multimodal presentations that introduce readers to critical issues/keywords in climate fiction in an entertaining and educational way. I currently envision each one of these components as an assignment or series of assignments that students will perform throughout the semester both independently and collaboratively.

To start, I need to cultivate student buy-in. That’s where the website fits in, at least in my mind. Rather than having an assignment that is written for me and read by me, I want to develop assignments that students recognize will be read by others, strangers, potential employers, future friends, longstanding enemies, and perhaps other scholars in the field. While these seem like high stakes, I want to make it feel more doable through lower stake assignments.

Critical blogs would be my first step. These feel like the most natural assignment to migrate first, considering so many instructors already do them online. In the first few weeks, I want students generating and responding to content a lot. Similar to what we are doing here, I will ask them to respond to an open-ended prompt and then ask them to respond to a set number of people. These will be short: 1-2 pages. Furthermore, I will help students to recognize that these are the beginnings of their critical essays. Therefore, I can use this as a way to get students to start writing early and to set them on the path for revising later.

Transforming these blogs into critical essays would be my next turn. In order to do this, I will divide the class into working groups based on their interest. These groups will be in charge of identifying and generating content for the website by working together to revise blog posts into more formal essays that they are used to writing/reading. I want this to be done via groups because I want students to collaborate to decide what blog posts are most successful. Rather than having me act as an editor, I want every student in the class to assume that role to some degree. Additionally, I see this as a reiterative assignment. That is, students will be asked to send their essay through multiple rounds of revision with multiple people in their group at different stages. I want to really use this as a time to highlight the repetitive process of good revision, and I really want students to have time to develop something that they are really proud of, especially since it will be publicly available (with exceptions).

While working on this, I’ll also assign these groups various texts for which they will be in charge of creating Wikipedia pages. Students will either work in partners (or in triplets) on a single author or text. I will ask that they to essentially reproduce a Wikipedia page about their subject in form and content. I will task them with deciding what kind of information is most critical and how they want to organize it. At the same time, I’ll assign another two groups the job of peer reviewing their Wiki post. Much like Wikipedia, all students in the class will act as experts and will be in charge of correcting and refining their peers’ ideas.

Finally, I want all of these different elements to converge with a multimodal presentation in which the different groups work together to combine their thoughts into a coherent project with a clear thesis and strong, well-analyzed support that is visually/aurally interesting. For example, if one of the groups is organized around “Race and Colonialism,” then they might discuss how a novel, a poem, and a film work together to explore how narratives of climate change can illuminate the sovereignty of indigenous communities in the United States. For here, students can combine their own ideas from their blog posts, their essays, and their Wikipedia posts into a project with even bigger stakes—projects that they would be incapable of doing independently within the same constraints. Importantly here, I would also want to introduce them to new publishing formats such as StoryMapJS or TimelineJS that can give them new ways of thinking about the assignment/their argument/organization/publication.

When it comes to collaborative assignments, I think Janette hits the nail on the head. Without student buy-in and clear expectations, it won’t meet your own goals. Through these scaffolded assignments, I hope to teach students about the process of crafting, drafting, and publishing information in ways that can prepare them for future classes/careers. Additionally, I hope that these kinds of group work-projects can introduce students to collaboration in non-threatening ways. Most of these can be done independently to some degree, but to full completion. In this way, I also hope to show students that working fully independently is a myth. Good writing rarely happens in isolation, and I hope is work-project assignments can begin transforming how students think about composition more broadly.

I’d actually love to hear people’s thoughts on this. I’m not gonna lie. This is a massive project. I actually kinda see it as an on-going project that last for multiple years and multiple semesters. In this way, I hope that students can recognize how collaborative work is not limited to their current semester. Rather, they are still in collaboration with students from the past and with the students who will take this class and revise upon their work.

Sorry that got long… 🙂

Dear All,

I must confess that coming up with ways to migrate f2f group work online is a bit daunting. As an undergraduate, I hated group work because I found that one or two people generally took over the project and not everyone’s voice came through. As an instructor, I have found successful group can transform the classroom into a real community. I like to do projects in my classes, and enjoy watching my students collaborate. One question I have is to what extent can the writing itself be collaborative without one student taking over?  In my classes, I often have students work in groups to write specific tasks, like to summarize an article. I watch them deliberate about what should go into the summary and find this conversation helps them develop their thoughts. I can see this kind of activity migrating effectively onto a whiteboard or message board.  In one classroom experiment, I organized the groups based on ability. I had a couple of really advanced students who needed to be pushed and I was afraid that if I dispersed them, they would end up dominating each group. This approach worked because they pushed each other. The other groups, I arranged based on skill level and strengths, keeping the groups stacked. While each member had different strengths, no one really dominated the group.  It seems like for a class of strong readers, group work will be successful no matter what. My concern is more for the weaker readers and writers who don’t necessarily know how to read tone. How do we make them less self-conscious online? (I feel it myself as I type this because I am more comfortable writing longhand. I find that my writing sounds stilted when I type on the computer.)  I have done group peer review conferences, and that has worked well. I like the idea of trying to set something like that up online. Janette’s video made me think about this in talking about synchronous meetings (something I did eons ago as a graduate student).  So, my questions are:

1) How does one create the trust and working rapport necessary for successful collaboration?

2) To what extent can the writing itself be collaborative without one student taking over?

3) How do we push our students to go (in Ken Bain’s words) beyond “surface learning” (doing the minimum to say they completed the assignment) and experience “deep learning?” I guess I’m reiterating Janette’s question of how to turn the experience away from a focus on grades and towards a learning community.

Greetings! Here are my thoughts for this week:

This week I decided to go back and read Warnock’s introduction, and his emphasis on how an OWcourse can actually put the focus on more intensive writing while revealing the intricacies of the rhetorical situation, “students are writing to you and to each other in virtually all of their course communications, expanding ideas of audience, purpose, and context each time they contribute to a message board, create a blog entry, or engage in an email-based peer review” (xi). So for this week, I want to focus on thinking about how the OWcourse may strengthen collaborative work and the ways in which I present and scaffold an end-of-semester group project. Although, I think Janette’s point about the potential drawbacks (less autonomy for students who want an “anytime, anyplace” set up for their online classes) of extended group projects, I have been considering the possibilities of migrating a group project from an f2f course to an OWcourse

In my ENG 100 and HSE courses, much of the semester is devoted to different modes of rhetorical analysis (though I have become increasingly less jargon-heavy in my prompts and scaffolding). We start with the analysis of one text, next we move on to the lens assignment, then we incorporate research, and end the semester with the analysis of a visual artifact. The final unit is focused around ideas/ questions about gender identity, After analyzing 3-5 written arguments, we move into an analysis of a documentary called Miss Representation- I have students work in small groups for multiple class meetings- identifying rhetorical strategies the filmmakers use (editing, music, shot type, sequence, structure) and analyzing why they use them. This culminates in a group project where each group is assigned specific strategies to identify and analyze how these strategies work and why they’re used. Students can use PP, Google Slides or any other platform to develop a multimedia presentation for the class.

Some thoughts on why an OWcourse would benefit and might even strengthen this project

The visual aspect won’t get lost – here I’m thinking I would provide a model of analysis using clips from the film with recorded commentary that students could access when needed then after being set up in groups, students could asynchronously practice their own analysis of whichever strategies they feel compelled to pay attention to, recording their findings on a Google doc, including screenshots, or links to short clips of the documentary to give examples.

Group roles: One thing I need to strengthen in my f2f classes in the context of group work is careful attention to who does what. Warnock acknowledges the challenges of staying on task, and advocates for the assignment of group roles-“leader, meeting organizer, secretary, head researcher, chief editor” (149). I think an online space could end up making these roles more concrete and effective since many students might appreciate the dynamics of more clearly defined roles that need to be clearly laid out for the online context.

One idea that I heard on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast that seemed to lend itself well to an online class while addressing many of the potential issues in Warnock’s section on Team Projects was the idea of the Scrum Board. Rebecca Pope Ruark, author of Agile Faculty, promotes the idea of using a Scrum Board to help students work collaboratively and track progress. In her explanation, a Scrum Board has three separate columns-To Do, In Progress, and Completed. Once groups are underway, they could track their progress on a virtual Scum Board-this could be a Google doc or some other virtual space -I’m open to suggestions! This would be specific to each group- with smaller sections for the responsibilities of each individual group member and the corresponding tasks. I imagine this would be a good space for groups to monitor their progress and I could track who is assigned which task and how each group member is contributing.

Finally, each group could come together to craft their final presentations- they may need to do a few synchronous planning sessions to develop the presentation, but they could break it up into individual components that each member could work on individually and then bring back to the group. One question I have is for the presentation itself- would we have synchronous sessions where the groups could present “live” or would we have a discussion space where students could view the presentations on their own time? I would have to work this out.

Feedback: This is another area where I feel like the possibilities of technology would benefit strong feedback. I would record an asynchronous response to their presentations- giving them feedback and assessment- attending to how effectively they worked as a group.Afterwards they could assess their own work both individually and collaboratively in a discussion thread specific to their group (though I’m hoping the Scrum Board will help recursively do much of this work).

I still have lots of questions and concerns about how this will translate/ transition but I am excited by the possibilities.

Thanks!
 

Happy Saturday!

I love that this assignment has me already thinking about the courses I teach and I can begin the process of HOW to transfer F2F collaborative work toward online interactions.

Janette’s video and Warlock definitely gave me some ideas as to WHAT I can do ahead of time to have online collaborative group work feel purposeful versus a goal toward points or desired grade.

Janette’s discussion on building a foundation for students to see the importance of collaborative work beyond grade and more toward: personal development and communication skills, as the more desired benefits, is a nice way to get students to think about the larger reward at hand. This is something I’ll definitely use as Janette’s methods communicate the importance of collaborative work for students who may already carry the stigmas about online course being isolated experiences.

One particular assignment I give students is a photography project that then goes on exhibit for the campus.

Based on the themes we’ve covered throughout the semester (English 100 or English 201) students collaboratively create a photo album of images captured in their own community that highlight the themes discussed. For example, if we read ‘Borderlands/ La Frontera’ by Gloria Anzaldua, they can create a series of photos that capture their own understanding of the tangible and nontangible borders that exist in their own lives.

The second objective is for students work on a critical response, where they pull supportive evidence from the text to prove their photograph is doing that work.

Once the assignments are done, we usually display the photography and responses as the event for public viewing.

So the F2F assignment does two things: 1) Create photography 2) Create a space in which the photography can be viewed publicly.

Some ideas on how to make this happen online is to have students possibly create an Instagram or Facebook account. They can creatively name their account and create a mission statement based on the theme they’re working with. I figured this would be cool location to exhibit their work for public display. The collaboration would not only be the creation of the account and photography, but to have different group members respond to each other’s photography using the course material.

*The team can work on gaining a certain number of followers, an expected amount of photos for display, and find organizations on line who’d be interested in viewing the work their producing.

*The rest of the class can also respond to a certain number of photos with course material as an additional form of engagement.

*Perhaps to close out the assignment the group can write a reflective response about their project, how ‘collaboration’ came into affect, and the benefits of working together via online.

So that’s as far as the brainstorming has gone, but I feel accomplished knowing there’s possibility to bring the existing projects into OWcourses.

Excuse my goofy title, Megen’s was so clever I tried to compete

Group work has become increasingly important to my courses and, like Janette (thanks for the great video!), the day where I don’t implement a group component to my course is becoming rare. (I used to teach under the quarter system, where class periods were about an hour each time, so group work was a less frequent aspect of my pedagogical training–so the function of it within my classroom is evolving).

Collaborating Digitally – Some Benefits

Before getting into specifics about a collaborative assignment I do, I want to throw in a few thoughts I’ve been having that sort of reverses the conversation present in the bibliography for this week. The bibliography, and even Warnock to some degree, seems to focus on how online collaboration creates unique challenges not present in the class and that, really, in-class collaboration is potentially easier. I’m not sure how I feel about that overall, having not taught online, but I do think there are two points where online collaboration creates unique opportunities that rectify some of the difficulties of in-class groups.

1. Group work is often difficult in classes because student friend-groups have already been established, are often brought into the class, and often make students reluctant to work with others. I’m experimenting in my f2f classes with how to work around this, but online group assignments really don’t need to take this into consideration as much. Of course, I’m sure certain people won’t work well with each other, but that’s something that evolves over time rather than, usually, something brought in on the first day. (I find it interesting, though, that Janette actually cites issues of personality online as a difficulty–I’m perhaps just dealing with an especially difficult set of f2f personalities right now!).
2. Based on what Warnock says about the textual basis of online teaching, group work online allows for students themselves to create a conversation and introduce texts–rather than me introducing an object of analysis, students could post something to their group, and then have the group respond. This is of course possible f2f as well, but then the student introducing the text needs a new task. The asynchronous nature of online classes eliminates that problem.
3. Online group work is meditative, rather than temporally bound. What I mean by this is, rather than having a task to accomplish within a set boundary, class, online discussion boards or google docs allow students to put ideas and images, walk away and think, and come back later after reflection.

Collaborative Assignments in my ENGL 100s

Before I get into specifics, here’s a sampling of group-based activities I have done f2f:

• Have groups create, on paper, a game together that makes an argument about a topic
• Have groups do the same as above, but use Twine to actualize the game
• Have groups create an advertisement for a product using magazine clippings
• Have groups analyze a website together (I often use the NRA and BlackLivesMatter websites)
• The common activity of having students move around the room together answering questions on topics (last semester I taught on ENGL 100 based on gender that included questions like “Should all genders be integrated in sports?”)
• Have students create short presentations about book chapters

I’ll focus the rest of the past on the first in my sampler platter: having students create games together.

I do this usually in a section of my class dedicated to rhetoric. We go through multiple forms of rhetoric and eventually end with procedural rhetoric, definitions below.

We play a variety of games in class (this is also done as collaborative activities), on a variety of topics: immigration (Papers, Please), gender transition (dys4ia and Mainichi), bullying (Lim), economic inequality (Spent and Cart Life). (Usually I teach two or three of these games per semester). Then, at the end of this unit, I have students work together to design a game, in writing, which does one of the following: 1) Makes an argument about some important topic to them or 2) Addresses a group that is usually underrepresented in the gaming community (we brainstorm about who is underrepresented.

The activity usually goes well: students tend to like it; they find it creative and interesting and thought provoking. I am often not as satisfied with it, though, because it always seems rushed. It always seemed like something that, in the bounded space of the classroom, had to be quick and simple rather than something that spanned more time. I feel like all of that would potentially change if I brought this activity online.

Through the asynchronous, unbounded, and meditative possibilities of online communication, I could turn this activity into a longer project.

• A google doc could transform into a place not to just put thoughts, but also to draw and put images of characters, to find conceptual images, to link to potential music etc. I feel like this is all possible in-class, but that the urgency to do this now may siphon some of the creativity and exploration that less rigid time constraints will allow.
• I could help groups use the polling features on Canvas to get marketing data, essentially, from the rest of the class: what type of character would you prefer? How should our game end? Etc.
• I could have students record their own thoughts on their games and designs, explaining how they contributed to the group, as a way of assessing the activity.
• Discussion boards could operate as spaces to test ideas, to see what other groups or doing, to collaborate between groups, to share existing games that students think might be good models.

There are a lot of possibilities here with an online class. All of this, again, could be done in a f2f class (and now that I’ve written it all, I am excited to potentially try it next semester–I like this idea now much better for a f2f class than I did when I originally thought of it, so think you blog sounding board), but online it seems like it would be so much more fluid and experimental.

I am realizing this post is becoming a monster, so I am going to end there (I want to jump away and start designing a prompt for this collaborative project now).

I hope the semester is going well for everyone and not like the meme below–

Collaboration is something I never thought about when I was a student taking online courses—the classes I took over Blackboard were always very cut-and-dry: watch a PowerPoint, take some notes, respond to several posts, write a paper. While I understand that Blackboard ITSELF was very cut-and-dry—and admittedly, this was back in olden times—I wonder at the lack of collaboration within those courses. After reading Warnock’s chapter 14 and watching Janette’s video, I now think group work would have been very doable in those primitive e-classes of yore.

So, without further ado, I present my sample collaboration sequence. As I’ve yet to teach online/hybrid courses, this is all pure speculation and ideas; it’s a series I HOPE would work, but would need to be trialed and tested. My goal is to create a multi-modal, multiple-learning-pathways unit that fosters process work and scaffolding.

This would be a collaboration model I’d use in the later part of the semester for my standard English 100 course, which of course would have been translated into an OWcourse. The sequence would probably start in Week 11 or 12. This model doesn’t include PowerPoints and other lessons from me, entire-class posts, or individual work—it’s purely focused on the collaborative aspects. Here I go:

Multi-Modal Collaboration Overview

♦ The two texts they’d be working with are transcripts of Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” and Shafak’s “The Politics of Fiction,” two pieces I adore and highly recommend. I think Warnock’s (149) and Janette’s shared idea to sort students into smaller groups is both logical and brilliant, and therefore I’m unashamedly copying it: the students in this assignment would be sorted into groups of five.

♦ The assignment will ask students to work together in their groups of five to fully analyze the rhetorical devices, arguments, and strategies in both pieces. The final paper for this unit (which is not collaborative but is worth mentioning) would ask for each student to individually compose a comparative analysis of both pieces. They would do this in order to assess which rhetorical devices work best (and perhaps also which are weakest) in supporting similar arguments. That aside, the group would be working on a group assignment associated with the same readings where they give a presentation (yep, an OWcourse presentation!) on how ten rhetorical devices are functioning within the two pieces. The ideal is each student would be responsible for tracing two devices: one in Adichie’s and one in Shafak’s. They’d be collaborating, sharing their ideas, and working together to build a strong final presentation. All the process work is low-stakes: all the posts, discussion, etc. they do leading up to the creation of their presentation is worth points, which rewards them for being team players. These low-stakes steps are probably worth 10 points each, rewarding and enticing, but not akin to the heavy grade value (100 points out of a 1000-point class) the final group assignment itself is worth.

Series of Activities in This Sequence

1) Discussion Board Sounding Ground Pt. 1: After the students read the two pieces and have had a good deal of class-wide instruction and primary discussion, they’d be sorted into groups of five and asked to begin by creating one 7-9 sentence post discussion the various devices they’ve found in the two pieces. They would then briefly respond to the four others’ thoughts as well. In responding to each other, my hope is they’d see which devices are more prevalent than others within each piece.

2) Google Form: From here, they’d all visit a Google form and vote on a time to synchronously (Warnock 150) meet in a (designed by me) Chatstep Chat Room meeting. There is only one synchronous meeting they’d be required to hold. (Btw: Chatstep is a really nice website used to create private and safe chatrooms. If I need to step in and moderate, I have that option). The students are free to synchronously or asynchronously talk with each other in whichever ways they like best outside of this requirement.

3) Group Chat: In their synchronous chat, they’d select which devices they’ll each be tracing and how they’ll divide up the work. They’d also vote on how to approach the final product: they can use Camtasia or any other screen-recording software to either record their individual portions all meshed together, or record or upload them all individually to their group assignment folder on Canvas. Their final presentations can be PowerPoints, Google Slides, Youtube videos, or anything else they can dream up to meet the criteria. (Nota bene: I’d like to have an actual list of media for them to select from by that point, but I’m still currently working on broadening that list ☺).

4) Group Google Docs: Each group would have two Google docs, one of Adichie’s transcript, and the other Shafak’s. These two docs would be limited to the group of five. They’d each asynchronously highlight and comment on their devices. This assignment would also require them to respond—at least one per fellow student—to each other’s comments on the same doc. This allows them to provide feedback to each other’s ideas on the actual pieces themselves. This way, they can all—as a team—see the actual examples of the devices and read each other’s thoughts on how those devices and examples are functioning.

5) Discussion Board Sounding Ground Pt. 2: They’d each post on an additional discussion board their finalized analyses of their selected devices. This assignment would, once again, ask for each student to additionally respond to at least one other peer’s ideas. This is one more chance for joint effort and group cooperation.

6) Presentation: They’d each record/upload the presentation of their devices. Again, the type of presentation is up to them: PowerPoints, Prezis, Youtube Videos, actual recordings of themselves, whatever works best for them is fine with me.*

7) Google Doc Credit Sesh: After posting their presentations, they would go onto a group Google Doc and do the following: reflect on how the assignment went, *justify their choice of media, and explain which parts of the collaboration they were responsible for. I know this might be an unpopular strategy, but as someone who was the student who always ended up with all the work, I feel this portion is vital towards a fair distribution of points.

8) AV Feedback: I’d provide the group with feedback. This step needs more thought, of course, as I’m not sure how I want to approach it. I might decide on one master recording of me going through their presentations accompanied with my audio commentary. Whatever I chose, I’d be sure to also provide them with a document listing their group grade and plenty of explanation.

So, of course, there are a few disclaimers to this sequence: first, these aren’t the only activities they’d be working on, just the collaborative ones. There would be other whole-class activities, individual assignments, lectures, and readings they’d be working on simultaneously. Second, this would take place over the course of four or five weeks. Third, I have no idea how successful this activity would be, although I have high hopes—I’d love a chance to try it out, of course!

After this unit, I now have a lot more hope and faith in the possibility of collaboration outside of just doing peer reviews—which, like Warnock, I didn’t want to belabor (149). I am in constant awe of the digital possibilities open to us nowadays and would like to incorporate other newfangled techs into this design. Please let me know if you have any suggestions!

Thanks Janette for your great video.

I thought you stated what many of the scholarly articles stated, but your explanations were clear and provided a good framework and advice, so thanks.

1. Buy-in

It seemed to me that your advice of getting students’ buy-in was an important thread throughout all the literature since many online students might expect and prefer to work alone. It may even be the sole reason they have chosen to attend online classes, so I think your ideas of preparing them right away from the course description and syllabus would be important for everyone but especially for the loner.

2. Clear expectations

I must confess that that when things fall flat in my classes, I have to take responsibility for not having clear expectations of not only the outcomes but how they will reach them. Also having clear expectations for students you won’t see f2f becomes crucial since you won’t be able to do a spur of the moment correction. I would think that this step might take quite a bit of time to prepare and might get better over time when the pitfalls become clearer.

3. Start small

I felt more reassured by your advice to start small and build up from peer reviews and discussions which are a part of every course to larger types of group work.

A f2f group assignment that I would consider migrating to an online composition course is actually a pre-writing activity. I have come to feel that preliminary research and pre-writing activities can help students organize and write better essays, so I would carry this philosophy online.

I prepare the students by mirroring the following process in class on a different topic. Their assignment is to do general research on the assigned topic with the end product being a random list of 25 phrases or terms they jot down while reading and bring to the next class.

The in-class groups of about 4 students then take the random lists and cluster like items together into two shorter lists, leaving out what doesn’t fit. They then create a general category name for each of the two clusters.  The topic I’ve used for this is an essay on the effects of school bullying, and after the clustering of ideas, the student groups have come up with such organizational patterns as short term/long term effects, physical/psychological, victim/bully, or others. Their group work continues with organizing the sub- items in the two clusters in order to group ideas together and create a logical flow—they have actually roughly outlined the body paragraphs. The group then comes up with a working thesis sentence that works for their organizational pattern, and together they draft an introductory paragraph. Their assignment for the week is to write the body paragraphs using the organized list of ideas, adding what is needed, and backing up their ideas with research.

The following week, the same groups do a peer review of each member’s resulting essay.

I think that the changes that would need to occur to move this to an online course would be a video of my initial mirroring demonstration. The preliminary research and creating the random lists would remain the same, but the lists would simply need to be shared in the groups I create.

It seems that what I can do in a 4 hour f2f class would need to be broken down into pieces so that each student in the group can contribute to the process through Google docs and small group discussion.

Hey Everyone,

I am jumping in a bit late here, yet with the advantage of hearing what you all have to say. As has already been mentioned I am also excited about Warnock’s basic approach to think of the transition to teaching online as an opportunity to recognize your teaching talents, the things you know you do well, and find ways to translate that online (xiv). How can I use technology to take what I do well already and make it even better is a good question?

While I have never taught a fully online course, I have been teaching hybrid courses for a while—courses where I am continually trying different ways to integrate technology into the learning process. Before 2013, I was the kind of technology skeptic who dealt with technology as little as possible (basic email and CMS only). In this way of thinking, technology is yet one more thing taking us away from the “real” work of teaching. The change for me was a graduate seminar with Kory Lawson Ching called Teaching Writing in a Digital Age. That seminar shifted my world completely towards being excited about digital rhetoric and thinking, along with Elizabeth Clark about  how we can use technology to “re-create the contemporary worlds of writing our students encounter every day” (2009: 1).

Students complete all of their writing online in my courses using google docs that they store in a course folder on their google drive. One of the first things we do together is learn to use google docs and google drives including team drives. When students complete an assignment they then submit a link to their google doc on Canvas with the “can edit” option set for my feedback. I then use speedgrader to access their assignments and provide feedback directly on their google doc. Google docs can be used for drafts of essays and also for feedback on outlines, introductions, and other “parts” of their projects as needed. We use google docs for instructor feedback and also for peer-review. Besides google docs and drives we use discussion forums often in my courses to for invention work, to post our ideas for Essay X, or our thesis statements or our conclusions (if we are working on ways to expand out conclusions etc.)

In reading Warnock’s chapter 12, I am excited about the possibilities for using audio visual technologies to improve my feedback.  One things from this chapter that has me thinking is his discussion about how we need to develop a relationship with our students at the beginning–and how important this is.  We know from Wood’s  Teaching Men of Color in the Community College: A Guidebook (2015), that this is especially important for  first gen students.  So how do you do that in an online environment is a question I’m reading for?  Most of you have much more experience teaching online and using a variety of online tools so I am eagerly reading and learning from your posts here:)

Best,

Yolanda S. Venegas

In the past, I have tried using macros for electronically submitted essays. However, for the most part, I found the text in macros felt too generic or repetitive, and managing the macros more difficult than simply typing individual responses to students. I am excited to learn about new tools for use in future online sections of composition courses that others share in this blog that offer a better way to provide feedback improving the quality and perhaps the number of responses to student writing.

Because I just started using Canvas this semester, I was happy to learn about tools provided in Canvas that were included here in the bibliography. Specifically being able to email a student directly from the grade book is something I will use in my campus course, but I can see how important it would be online for immediate feedback with ease of use for the instructor.

I currently use rubrics for assignments, but I’m not sure how much students actually review them before submitting an assignment, so I think Warnock’s suggestion of electronic rubrics would also help students realize what’s expected and then how that resulted in the grade they received.