Free Software

This assignment pushes students to recognize the layers of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in something as visual and auditory as a flash game.

This assignment was designed to get students to practice their close reading skills in a short, condensed format of a blog post.  Students sign up to blog for a given class day, chosing a short passage from the assigned reading for that day.

By creating their own Twitter accounts and finding accounts to follow that are related to their research topic, students learn the difference between library resources and online resources like daily news, blogs, and opinion.

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.

This lesson introduces students to a collaborative annotation tool to facilitate class discussions and to encourage active reading and research practices.

In this lesson, students created Dipity timelines that allow them to integrate multi-media content into a temporal-sequential order.  Taking the sources from their first essay, students reflect on the benefits of the multimedia/chronological presentation.

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class.

This assignment asks students to engage in an uncommon form of literary analysis, where the goal is to determine the significance of location and travel in the novel. The entire class collaborates in creating a Google map of all of the places that Humbert Humbert travels to in Lolita.

This is a short assignment using the free text visualization software, Wordle, to help students find keywords for researching their chosen topics.

Using the free digital timeline website, Dipity, students can organize and annotate their sources chronologically.  This enables students to visualize the sequence of events and better address how particular texts interact with or talk past each other.

Even though we use enthymemes in our everyday speech, teaching the concept presents difficulties. By making enthymemes in the interactive fiction design system Inform7, students develop a deep understanding of implied reasoning.

This assignment focuses on using a visual thesaurus to illustrate the nuanced relationships among words that the list form of the traditional thesaurus glosses over.

Make the first day of class more engaging by creating a Prezi to introduce the major concepts on your syllabus. This offers students some visualization tools for what can be a tedious lecture.