I’m gonna miss our weekly discussions! Interestingly, I did the sequence out of order, but curry and all the other WwMers have made it an enlightening and gratifying experience. This time around I felt more confident in my thinking about online pedagogy, and making solid connections with the work my peers are doing. This summer, I teach online for the first time and I’m sure I will be revisiting our work here throughout the process. But, I also am already applying so many of the insights and knowledge to the daily work in my f2f classes. So thank you one and all – hope to see you in the “real” world on campus. 

My posts:

Unit 1: Philosophical Musings: A Series of Principles

Unit 2 : Course Managing My Pedagogical Philosophies

Unit 3: Staying Student Centered Online

Unit 4: Engaged Thesis Activity

Unit 5: Opening Up New Reading/ Writing Experiences Online

Hello friends!

This is the end for me! I’m so sad to depart because you’ve all taught me so much about using technology in the classroom. You’ve all been such incredible wellsprings of knowledge and experience that I can’t possibly express my gratitude for your blogs, comments, and conversations. All of this brings me to the thematic ligament that connects each of my blogs: Collaboration via Technology.

Over the course of this semester, I have been experimenting with different online learning platforms that foster collaboration in virtual classrooms. I’ve been actively trying to find informal lessons that incorporate technology in order to build communities and encourage students to work together. In many ways, the possibilities for collaboration are a lot stronger in virtual environments than F2F ones, and programs such as Perusall and Google Docs have highlighted. Finally, technology allows us to empower our students to find, evaluate, and share readings that can be incorporate into course. Throughout this experience, I’ve really appreciated how y’all have encouraged collaborating with students to shape the directions of the class. As educators, we must collaborate with our colleagues and our students in order to cultivate curiosity and discovery.

• Blog 1: https://wordpress.miracosta.edu/writingwithmachines/2019/02/11/migrating-my-teaching-style/
• Blog 2: https://wordpress.miracosta.edu/writingwithmachines/2019/02/25/peruse-all-this-post/
• Blog 3: https://wordpress.miracosta.edu/writingwithmachines/2019/03/11/well-contented-students/
• Vlog 4: https://wordpress.miracosta.edu/writingwithmachines/2019/04/02/6-minute-writing-process/
• Blog 5: https://wordpress.miracosta.edu/writingwithmachines/2019/04/22/accessing-accessibility-online/

Godspeed, comrades!

Thank you to everyone for the opportunity to participate in our inspiring conversation over the last semester and year.  It was a real pleasure as I have learned so much from you:) 

My plan in this brief paragraph (we’ll see @ that) is to re-read the posts for this sequence to see if I can discern the contours of my teaching philosophy for technology in the writing class.  This is a total experiment and I have no idea if it will work or not, yet ideally I can sift out some principles that I can use to guide my use of technology in the writing class.

UNIT 1: How Technology Can = Equityminded Acceleration

UNIT 2: Exploring the Pedagogical Value of Blogs in the Writing Class

UNIT 3: How Can I Use Technology to Enhance/Enact My Teaching Philosopy

UNIT 4: Using Technology to Help Students Understand the Reading Process

UNIT 5: : Perusall, the Reading Process, and Engaged Difficulty

Guiding Principles for Technology in the Writing Class

1. Technology in the Writing Class enhances your equity-based teaching: for example you can embed basic skills and use technology to guide students through the reading and writing process
2. Technology enables you to “capture” and “archive” the work you do as a class as you move through the reading/writing process so that all of the scaffolding and knowledge you assembled as you worked on this or that is available for students to use when they are drafting an essay
3. You can use technology to open up your class towards writing that is more engaging, creative, owned by students. Laura Gibbs talks about using blogs in the writing class in her episode of teaching in higher ed and I write about this in my post for unit 2.  My students now used Piktochart and Canva to create an info-graphic on an issue they selected and were totally engaged by this assignment.
4. In organizing your course content–think about process–replicating in your organizational scheme the reading process, writing process, collective knowledge-building process: In designing your online courses ask: how can I organize my unit content to emulate X process? Image that underprepared students scrolling through your unit before sitting down to write the first draft of an essay: What would you want them to see?
5. Technology enhances our ability to teach Culturally Responsive Courses: we can use Ted Talks, You Tube Videos, the work of historically underrepresented writers and artists–technology opens up our courses to culturally responsive content and approaches
6. It is possible to create authentic caring relationships in online environments.  I use “authentic caring” here  in the way Angela Valenzuela defines it in Subtractive Schooling. 

I think the common thread throughout my posts is the improvement of collaboration with new technologies, vetting them, and how to incorporate them effectively into my class. Likewise,  I think collaborative annotation/reading analysis with equity in mind.  

UNIT 1: Design Troubles: Pedagogy and the Subversion of Canvas

UNIT 2: Learning Management Systems: A dash of Luddism, to go with the ludic

UNIT 3: Innovating the Classroom: Content in Online Teaching

UNIT 4: Down the Rabbit Hole: A Pedagogical Twine Adventure

UNIT 5: Conversations about Conversations: Approaches to a Post-Text World

I’m sad that this is the end of my second semester in the sequence, so this is my last post. I have really enjoyed gathering insights from others, hearing very practical advice, getting a lot of suggested readings, and just having a space overall where pedagogy could be celebrated, whether that be online or f2f. Going through this process has allowed me to wrap my head around and reflect on a lot of different approaches to teaching—looking back on my posts, I see how often I played devil’s advocate to myself (taking the role of a luddite), how theoretical and out there I got sometimes (like talking about conversations about conversations), and how I got to be more creative than I usually would be (through creating a Twine response for Unit 4, which I never imagined doing this semester). All of this is stuff, on a day to day basis, I am not usually able to do, so thanks everyone, and to curry, for giving a space for exploration and thinking about the practical and theoretical when it comes to designing intuitive and exciting digital spaces for students!

(PS: I am also happy I got a space to use all sorts of wacky memes, images, and titles).