https://youtu.be/UarehVh9nqM

Hello Canvas Mates, 

I am so happy to be back in this class.  Since I finished the first segment, I have been teaching online at Grossmont and City, but I need to be more engaging and organize my canvas in a more inviting way.   My traditional class is very active and “butts out of the seat,” but I have been unable to translate my online class to reflect how excited I am to teach or how much I respect and admire my students.  I know i have too many points of entry, and it must surely frustrate my students.  I have attached a clip of my current/traditional English 202 class, and I will be gratefull for any and all comments 

I’m waiting for my textbook due to arrive on the due date for this post, but I want to get started anyway. Though I’ve been using Blackboard and now Canvas for 16 years, I’ve begun to realize that creating an online course will be a lot of work! I certainly need this program to construct an online course and am grateful for it.

I viewed the video on Curry’s Eng 100 Course and learned new helpful terms like “access points,” “doorways,” and “pathways.” I hope the fact that I haven’t used those terms in the context of online teaching isn’t too painfully reflective of my newbie level of expertise here.

I have a few ideas about creating my courses after having viewed a few of the ones linked in this Unit: I want a home page with simple links to each week’s work: Week 1-16. For each week, once open, I need to figure out how to accommodate the following: 1. The week’s lecture/information (via slideshow or podcast) on the selected topic (critical reading, the writing process, essay structure, MLA formatting, etc.); 2. A blog or discussion forum for exercises that correlate with the lecture/topic; 3. Links to reading selections/videos/films; 4. A means by which students can upload essays when they are due (not every week, of course). 5. An occasional multiple choice reading quiz.

Here is my very rudimentary video- still working on sme of the basics, but I want to get this post up so I can get to my next class!

Ok I got the book today. Yes, the list in the intro proposed by Chickering and Gamson provides a good guide- I have heard one criticism from students who take online classes: the instructor doesn’t answer emails. I have already emailed Curry three times this first week, so I can see how getting to all those emails asking for instruction and clarification can be challenging. I hope to create, like everyone I suppose, a simple yet substantive course- I like Curry’s Eng 100 course: the same four parts/aspects for each week. I’m not sure how to encourage students to try and figure out answers to questions independently before emailing me, but I will chat with my colleagues for their advice on how best to approach that request from students.

I am comforted when reading the Warnock’s introduction about migration rather than transformation. I hope my courses, which are broken into fairly clear units with symmetry in instruction and praxis, will translate fairly well into an online format.

Re: Chapter 1 and voice and presence, I will be interested in seeing if my in-class style morphs from the chill instructor with that ’70’s vibe (b/c I’m that old) to something different…

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnX3I3szC

Hello comrades!

I really liked thinking about some of the ways of migrating our teaching principles to online formats. I have four principles that I’ve been thinking a lot about this semester, as I pilot some online teaching principles in my f2f course.

• Intuitive & Interactive Access:
  • Last semester, students expressed some difficulty navigating my Canvas site. I initially provided all the readings for the whole semester at once in the modules section (also I didn’t delete ANY of the side links… Major oops!). The combination of these circumstances, left students slightly unsure of when do what readings until I walked them through the process a few times. This semester, I have adapted my Canvas page to take advantage of a more intuitive and interactive style that uses a combination of pages and buttons (like curry’s course). Links to each week’s readings, discussion board, educational resource, and looming assignment are posted each week on the front page, so students see them immediately when they access Canvas. Rather than requiring students to guess where to find the materials, I make try to make it super duper obvious and easy.
• Community-Building & Collaborative Learning:
  • Building a tight-knit and collegial classroom is a core element of my f2f courses. In order to translate this to online courses, I want to engage with more digital platforms that enable students to read and write collectively. In the “Writing with Machines” workshop, we briefly discussed the possibility of organizing students into reading groups using platforms like Hypothesis. Rather than having students experience reading as an isolated, individual experience, I want to give them the tools to support each other. Additionally, I want to give them tools that they can use in other classes or even in their careers. While I haven’t yet introduced this tool into my course yet, I am considering doing so around week 8 after I am able to introduce students to the software.
• Productive Redundancy:
  • In f2f courses, scaffolding redundancy happens every day in implicit and explicit ways. I feel like OWCourses are actually incredibly well suited to productive redundancy. Not only can we encourage students to engage with our course material in set pathways (while giving them some degree of freedom as curry highlighted), but we can also ensure that they see the same material multiple times, in multiple ways. This semester, I’ve begun trying to scaffold this redundancy into my Canvas site more, as I’ll explain in the video. I don’t know if I’ve reached 100% efficacy. JK I can still do better.
• Multicultural Responsiveness:
  • So I usually design my courses to celebrate the intersectional experiences of students by countering deficit messaging in course readings and visual images. While I think my readings and visuals in my f2f course meet this threshold, I’m not sure my actual Canvas site does. It wasn’t until today that I thought about how I don’t include cartoons with characters of color in the ‘buttons.’ Additionally, I think I could even expand this moving forward by inviting students to recommends objects (clips, images, texts, etc.) that exemplify issues raised in each weeks’ readings. This ‘show and tell’ would give them a chance to write about a found object from their lives using the course material. In short, maybe I could use Jim’s portfolio-oriented blogs to give students space to make the course site responsive to their own cultural perspectives.

Screencast-o-Canvas: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnXrN3s4s

Greetings all! Great to be back thinking, writing, and discussing pedagogy.

When I think of my teaching philosophy, I tend to think of a series of principles or categories that are consistently overlapping to make some kind of cohesive whole, I hope. So I’ve attempted to outline these principles in a way that would be equally relevant in both an onsite and online course. 

Collaborative Interaction: For each course I have to say this is the core principle I work to make central to each stage of the semester’s work. I always think back to the classes I took in undergrad and grad school and remember how much I got out of group work, even if some days I wasn’t in the mood! In each class meeting I conduct, there is some form of interactive/ active learning for students to engage with. In my onsite classes, technology has been a useful tool to facilitate learning, especially with our access to chromebooks in specific classrooms. Students are able to weigh in on a prompt that I’ve posted on a shared Google doc, and then engage and interact with one another’s writing and ideas. Access points are developed and implemented, and technology helps to add variety and range. In terms of migrating this practice online, I appreciate Warnock’s suggestion that, ” . . . students can take over the conversation in a online environment perhaps even more effectively than they can with you [the instructor] present in the f2f room” (xvi). 

Relevance: Students engage more readily with class materials when they are able to connect it to their daily lived experiences in some way. For example,readings about technology can invite students into a topic that has direct relevance in their lives. Debates about dependency on technology invite students to engage in discussions that they have some degree of personal stake in. Warnock’s own discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of using online tools to teach writing provides a measured and thoughtful model for engaging with the topic of our use of and dependence on technology in our writing courses and beyond. In Charles Seife’s “The Loneliness of the Interconnected,” a reading I use in ENGL 100, he argues that “instead of exposing us to differences, the Internet actually encourages conformism and intolerance– and thus threatens basic principles that sustain a democratic society.” This would be an interesting discussion to jump into with students in an online course, especially with Warnock’s concern that so many of us have ” . . . sprinted headlong into the technological future [and] seem enthralled by digital technology to the point of risking being used by the tecnologies instead of the other way around,” echoing in our minds. 

Emphasis of connection between reading and writing: As the poet Willie Perdomo said: “There is no writing without reading. It’s the ultimate dialogue.” This goes back to my training in rhetoric and writing at SDSU, all writing is in dialogue with a larger conversation, and in response to ideas that are situated in textual artifacts of some kind. So, each writing assignment, whether low-stakes or a longer, more sustained essay is in response to some kind of text. The text can vary in type/ form, but our ideas/ writing are then in conversation with the discourse, and contextualized to make sense of audience and purpose. This can be migrated into an online situation as evidenced by Jim Sullivan’s comments on using writing prompts that favor developing an authentic audience. 

Develop connection and authentic interaction with students: I enjoy being in the classroom! I think I’ve gotten to a point in my career where I’m comfortable being myself with students, and I think this manifests well when they can see that I really do want them to do well and be successful. When students feel authentic care from teachers, it helps them feel supported and capable. Of course, this is coupled with high expectations, and academic rigor- I’m not suggesting the classroom should be devoid of formality. The idea of transitioning this online is an interesting puzzle for me. Warnock’s focus on developing an “online voice” seems especially relevant, and I appreciated his call to think about the importance of framing ourselves as an audience. Also, I really liked his suggestions of voices and roles to avoid: Unapproachable sage, apathetic drone, chum, fool, and harsh critic. 

Thanks for reading and here is a short video of my tour of CCS sample course:

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnXYE3stJ

Hello, All—

I have been so nervous to take this class with you all. I think I am afraid of being a “bad online student.” I think I worry that I will put the work for this class last on my interminable weekly to-do list because it’s not piled on my desk, my bed or my kitchen sink (can you tell I’ve been in a cleaning mood this weekend?).

But as I started admitting these nerves to myself, I thought–as I often do when I face a new challenge at MiraCosta–of my students. Some of them begin a term with apprehension or begin a semester saying they are “bad writers” or “bad at English.” Perhaps these nerves can serve me well if I am to teach in an online classroom. Empathy is not a bad place to start this Writing with Machines adventure, right? 

This leads me to one of the first of three ideas I want to share about my teaching: the importance of acknowledging our Humanity in the classroom. On the first day of classes, when students have introduced themselves in pairs and they introduce one another to the entire class, I also introduce myself. After I briefly outline my educational background, I tell them what I really want them to know about me: I share with them where I was born and raised and tell them about the people who mean the most to me. I tell students that I share this with them as a reminder that I am a human being, with a life that goes beyond the classroom walls…in the same way that I remember that THEY are human beings with lives, concerns, and passions outside our classroom walls. The sharing that we do through these icebreakers or during check-ins throughout the semester help us see one another as whole persons, which makes the reading and writing work we do engaging and thoughtful. 

Another core principle in my classroom is my belief that all students are holders and creators of knowledge. When I first read Dolores Delgado Bernal’s work, I knew I had found the language to express some of my experiences in the classroom as an English Language Learner and as a student of color. Here was this Latina academic—and she wasn’t alone—validating my invalidation (if that makes any sense). Due to my own experiences in the U.S. classroom in secondary and higher education, I take great care to express to all of my students, especially students of color (because their espitemologies or ways of knowing are often invalidated in educational institutions), that they can hold and create knowledge. This is one of the reasons I theme my ENGL 100 class around the ideology of the American Dream. When the semester begins, and I ask students to journal what the American Dream means to them, they already have a lot to say (and write). 

Finally, I want to add that as I was reading Teaching Writing Online, what made me hopeful and less nervous about the course was thinking of how to demystify the writing process in an online or hybrid course. Because there is so much writing involved in the online classroom, I got excited about the many ways to remind our students that they are writers, and that they indeed are writing and rewriting all the time in their everyday lives. In my classroom, I also highlight that writing can be messy and collaborative, rather than the solitary and painful task that we can make it out to be. Currently, one of my favorite things about my face to face experience is when I have one-on-one conferences with students while the remainder of the class is engaged in a peer-to-peer writing workshop. I see tremendous growth in my students as their questions get more specific and thoughtful with each assignment. I am looking forward to learning of the ways I can create a similar rapport with my students in an online or hybrid setting. 

Here is my video: 

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnInk3Lpr

Hi everyone! Glad to be back!

It’s difficult to distill a teaching philosophy into a set of specific principles, especially since mine overlap so much, but here are some of the key principles of teaching composition that often form the foundation of how I approach all of my assignments, class activities, and course materials:

Interactivity: This is probably my most constant and important course design philosophy, which takes the idea of a “student-centered” classroom and transforms it to consider tech-based and dynamic ways to facilitate conversation and exploration. Part of his, to me, also involves what Warnock calls “pedagogical experimentation” (xxii)—I seek to find ways to make a classroom “active” that go beyond how we usually define that term (which generally involves different forms of discussion, like Socratic seminars and think/pair/share. Though, I am doing more Socratic seminar style things this semester than usual, sitting with my students in a desk). To me, interactivity involves creating interfaces for students to interact with together—so bringing in digital tools and games to foster new ways of thinking.

Contextualized conversations: I find it important to the way I approach my pedagogy to engage students through topical conversations—by either formulating a class around a specific topic or a broader theme that can facilitate conversations about culture and identity—such as my ENGL202, which I call “The Rhetoric of Pop Culture.” Through that theme, we enter into conversations about freedom, choice, consumer desire, audience reception, and cultural representation. I also found the point Warnock quotes from Wahlstrom that “computer supported literacy that students develop may prepare them for an exploitative environment rather than protect them from it” (xx) interesting, since my ENGL100 is themed around how digital media has changed reading, writing, and thinking processes, and one of the conversations we have is about the potential oppressive exploitations embedded within digital cultures. I feel it’d be useful, then, to take some of those conversations about digitalization into an actual space of digitalization—the online classroom. Contextualized classrooms also, of course, create more buy in for students and give them more agency in understanding course concepts.

Analytical reading: I have always assigned contextualized, topical reading that in some respects can be a stretch for students—maybe requiring more attention or clarification than they are used to needing when reading. In the past, I approached this as being about exposing students to complex concepts and thought processes to expand their academic vocabulary and get them thinking about issues they normally don’t expend energy on. Increasingly, though, I am finding that an integral part of my philosophy is to have students analyze the language itself of these articles and to take the more meta-writing approach to reading that is central to a lot of composition instruction. I have always told my students to think of the articles as examples of writing, but I am not building in more activities to get students thinking about the rhetorical effects of different forms and styles of academic writing.

Understanding and Flexibility: This last one is more of an “attitude” embedded in my course design and teaching persona (to harken to that section in the Warnock reading). My teaching persona is much more personable and confident than I generally am in other social situations—so I use this to my advantage to get more one-on-on knowledge of students during group learning activities and to find common ground with students. I am comfortable with the ebbs and flows of conversation (as they get derailed and re-reailed—isn’t this the way we generally speak in our conversations outside of classes, anyways!), and so try to schedule activities that allow for that level of flexibility. I also maintain flexibility when it comes to assignments, though I am becoming more rigid on that (I’m always flexible with large assignments, such as essays, but am less so with low stakes things like reading responses).

Lastly, here is the link to my video looking at some interesting (and not great) Canvas course samples from Northwestern University:

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqn6Fp3KkT

Hi everyone! My name is Erica and I am looking forward to working virtually with all of you 🙂

Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles were clear articulations of many of the values I hope we already emphasize and model in our face-to-face courses, but I understand these can be more challenging to communicate and model in an online course unless one is being very intentional with course design.

One value I especially connect with is “respecting diverse talents and ways of learning.” In my face-to-face classes I constantly move between different modalities to give students as many roads to Rome (I like to call them) as possible. As I begin designing what will be my first 100% online composition course for this summer, I find myself looking at the activities, lessons, and resources I already use in person and asking myself how or if they will be as effective in an online environment. One resource I love to use is TedEd. Those lessons are customizable and I typically assign these as supplements or homework. These could easily become an assignment or lesson in an online class. They incorporate video, additional readings, and a place for discussion. For all of these reasons, I like TedEd and feel it might be a good fit for my online class. But, what else? That was an example of a tool that can support “different ways of learning,” but what am I doing in my face-to-face class that “respects diverse talents?” This was harder for me to answer. Although I recognize it as one of the core values of my class, I also had trouble identifying a clear assignment that supported that value. Upon examination, I feel I mostly model this via in-class discussions and activities — who do I task with being a discussion leader, for instance? How do I determine working groups in class, when I assign them at all versus allowing students to choose? These questions are easily answered: I learn my students strengths and talents and then try to group them up in ways or assign them tasks that will help to either shine a light on those talents or challenge them not to rely on that talent and push them to develop a weakness. I may pair a student who has trouble developing ideas with a talkative student who constantly asks questions, for instance. I want to think about this more and imagine the ways that I can move some of these practices online. I want them to be effective, and I want them to feel flexible. I want students to feel understand and feel that I am stoking their curiosity and individuality, but I also need to make sure there is a clear structure for doing all of this exploring. 

Finally, for my online course exploration I chose to look at a MOOC offered by Stanford University. I’ve used it before as a supplement in my own composition class, and wanted to re-examine it this week with a focus on its pedagogical design and user-friendliness.

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnQq23d78

The seven principles for undergraduate teaching by Chickering and Gamson are “contact between students and faculty, reciprocity and cooperation among students, active learning, time on task, feedback, communicating high expectations, and respecting diverse talents and ways of learning.” These principles are probably already core values in our f2f courses from day one by defining clear expectations in the syllabus and carefully crafting clear, meaningful assignments, to providing class time with active learning and group participation which respects diverse populations and fosters cooperation among students, to communication and feedback both in person and in writing both verbally and as part of the grading process. Therefore, a well-designed online course would continue to incorporate these fundamental concepts into an online environment.

Some of the key principles of teaching composition that I hope to incorporate into an online composition course are defined by the checklist on page xvi. The importance of readings in my course that spark thought and student-centered conversation are very important to me, so I spend many hours finding up-to-date articles that are thought provoking and sometimes controversial.  Making these student-led discussions is also important in my course so that they really take something away in the end, learning to think critically and evaluate for themselves. I also highly value the use of workshop-like peer reviews which provide in-depth feedback that help students improve their writing. I have found that having clear questions or guidelines for the reviewer to answer about a student’s piece has increased the value of these.  I also feel that positive reinforcement and personalized feedback that helps them grow as a writer (and as a person) is an important aspect of my courses. To a lesser extent, I do use quizzes and presentations, but I see those as vehicles not really values.

Here is my video

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cqnh3k3Eo2