Software

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

This lesson plan builds on Andrew Uzendoski's lesson on teaching close reading using Rap Genius (now called Genius), focusing on teaching students the process of annotation, as well as how to articulate the building blocks of

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.

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

This exercise asks students to work in groups to move past a working summary of a text's rhetoric to consider the goals of an author and their strategic approach to audiences. It uses PBworks' collaborative potentials to bridge the gap between two connected class discussions.

This activity introduces students to iMovie software and reveals the range of rhetorical possibilities and effects that the program provides.

In this assignment students use the Oxford English Dictionary to make individual mindmaps of the multiple definitions of related words, then the class together creates a constellation of meanings surrounding a seemingly simple topic that becomes more and more complex. 

I’ve often found that writing about rhetorical concepts and theories only takes students so far. This assignment allows students to create concrete visual representations of concepts and theories in order to approach and think through them in a different manner.

This lesson uses Photoshop to manipulate creative commons images found on the Internet into an avatar which represents the persona or ethos from which the student will write on a course blog.

This lesson is best used in conjunction with “Using Mass Effect 1 to teach critical situations," which can be found under that title on this site.

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce the students to screen reader software, so that they will be aware of the challenges that blind people face in using web sites, and so that they can adjust their own sites to accomodate access for the visually challenged.

Using the extremely user-friendly online video creation tool, Animoto, students create short commercials pitching (potentially) odd combinations of products to target audiences (pianos to businessmen, running shoes to retirees, etc.)

For this assignment students use Photoshop to create a visual depiction or information graphic (infographic) of an essay. This infographic will focus on the interrelation and visual communication of ideas rather than statistics (as in traditional/popular infographics). 

This assignment is purposefully simple because its serves as a diagnostic for students' levels of functional digital literacy in programs like Photoshop and Jing. It also serves to familiarize some students with these programs, and with the processes necessary for maintaining their class blogs.

Students engage with and revise each other's texts using a wiki platform. Allows students to consider the various ways of composing a summary of a single text.

Students read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," discuss it in class, and then demonstrate their understanding of Orwell's chief style points through an activity using CritiqueIt, a tool for collaborative composition and peer review. 

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.