Presentations

Students create Google maps to contextualize events and locations related to their controversies.

First Day Introduction to Rhetoric Prezi

Kinetic typography is an animation technique that allows writers to mix text and motion. Students will take part of a speech or a piece of dialogue and animate it, carefully considering how they might visually enforce and/or subvert the text's underlying themes.

Students will synthesize their own rhetorical analysis with background research on their selected controversies using the visual-spatial format mimicked by Prezi's software.

Students come to class having read read an analysis focused upon the importance of the seemingly minor distinctions between "icons" and "symbols" in the context of Texas v Johnson, the definitive Supreme Court case regarding the extent to which an American flag and/or the burning thereof is “speech,” and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

This in-class exercise encourages students to explore context for texts they are analyzing (rather than receiving such context from direct instruction) and then use visualization software in order to present their findings to their classmates.

This lesson plan uses album covers and music to help students (1) utilize vocabulary and (2) consider the importance of context in rhetorical analysis.

Students work in groups to invent a person with a complete backstory, to whom they'll address an argument. This assists them to think about identifying a clear and specific ideal audience, as well as how they might tailor an argument to best address their reader.

In the course of discussing David Foster Wallace’s essay “Tense Present,” I asked my students to compare and contrast the en

This assignment challenges students to become digital activists/advocates for a cause of their choosing, and aids them in developing a portfolio of work in the service of that cause.

Designed to facilitate a deeper level of peer review and collaborative learning, this assignment asks students to deliver oral presentations of each others' work and offer constructive commentary on their peer's paper.

This plan puts student into groups of three or four and asks them to collaborate on generating a coherent analytical reading of a New Yorker cover image. The students present their readings to the class and then trade images and present a re-reading.

Students often struggle with narrative when writing research papers. This lesson plan helps students visualize controversies in order to help them develop structure and argumentation in their own work.

This assignment asks students to map out logos with the aid of visualized arguments and, ultimately, to create and explain their own vizualization of a textual argument that helps highlight the elements of logos within that textual argument.

As part fo the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, content service providers (such as YouTube) are given safe harbor from prosecution if they take certain steps to prevent copyright infringement. Unfortunately, this has led to a "shoot first and ask questions later" approach on YouTube's part.

I have my students complete their first major assignment in two forms: (1) An individual 3-page paper and (2) a 5-6 minute group podcast. In both, they describe a text and situate it in historical context.

Whenever I teach, I always assign some form of multimedia project, and these practices have helped to set up a studio environment where collaborative multimedia projects can thrive. Rather than post an explicit lesson plan to our site, I thought I’d run through a set of practices that have been successful for me ove

Using the multimedia curation program, Storify, students compose a short writing assignment analyzing an "author's" ethos based on his or her Twitter feed.  This demonstrates the ways in which ethos is cultivated over time and in a variety of different ways.

Students break up into two groups to engage in agonistic debate regarding an issue in an assigned reading in the course.

Students pair up to practice rebuttal. Partners present their position on their chosen controversy and have to fend off arguments for other positions that their partner comes up with. Partners change frequently and in quick succession.