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Pre-Writing: Surveying Expectations on the First Day of Class

Submitted by RMazique on Sat, 10/13/2012 - 19:18
The Writing Process Diagram with arrows showing the interrelationships between prewriting, writing, and revising.

On the first day of class, students think about the course topic and document their personal definitions of and understandings of the topic.

Podcast/Paper: Having Students Do the Same Assignment in 2 Media

Submitted by detweiler on Mon, 02/25/2013 - 14:04

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.

Using Prezi to Tour Course Syllabus

Submitted by Cate Blouke on Sat, 12/10/2011 - 10:17
Screen Shot of Prezi presentation

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.

Composing Short Writing Assignments for the Internet: Confronting the Digital Native Myth

Submitted by Steel on Mon, 09/16/2013 - 19:13
Digital native?

This peer learning assignment and lesson plan series gives students the opportunity to explore digital composition.

Teaching Orwell's Six Points of Style with CritiqueIt

Submitted by gertken on Sun, 04/22/2012 - 11:36
Students demonstrate their understanding of Orwell's chief style points

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. 

Conducting interviews - animating a controversy

Submitted by Bohmann on Tue, 12/10/2013 - 12:49

Students are asked to extract key claims and questions from an assigned article and then interview people about these claims and questions.

Oral History Group Podcasting Assignment

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 11:41
Students create podcasts as a way to think about composition beyond writing

Students conduct oral history interviews, write papers narrating the interviews, and then work in groups to create a multi-segment “radio show."

Using Google Maps with Alternative Learners

Submitted by Voss on Wed, 04/30/2014 - 14:31

This lesson plan will help students visualize unfamiliar geographic settings. For whatever reason (there’s probably an anthropological explanation), humans around the world are often ignorant of locales 3,000 miles away.

Collocating and Word Choice Using Madlibs

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 07/10/2012 - 11:48
students generate a template for a game in which they learn new words and collocations from their partners

Students use an online resource to learn some common ways that writers use a few "hard words". Then, with the children's game Madlibs serving as a model, students generate a template for a game in which they learn new words and collocations from their partners.

Digital/Physical Library Scavenger Hunt

Submitted by Meredith Coffey on Fri, 10/31/2014 - 14:05
Library bookshelves

For the first time in my admittedly short teaching career, I created and oversaw a library scavenger hunt for my class this semester. As critics of the activity have argued, the library scavenger hunt is at risk of purposelessness, particularly if it’s not designed with clear pedagogical or research goals in mind.

Using Storify to Analyze Poetry

Submitted by Ptacek on Sat, 09/15/2012 - 16:14
Screenshot of Storify page, with YouTube video of "The Second Coming"

Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past.  This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.

Researching a Controversy using Twitter

Submitted by gerdes on Tue, 03/12/2013 - 11:14
A screenshot of a twitter page. The tiled background is a blue textbook with a white greek column.

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.

Chronological Annotated Bibliography Using Dipity

Submitted by Cate Blouke on Fri, 03/16/2012 - 11:51
Annotated Bibliographic Timeline of The UC Davis Pepper Spray Incident

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.

Inventing Audience: Lessons from the Marketing Department

Submitted by Wise on Mon, 09/23/2013 - 16:57

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.

Exploring 18th-19th Century Crime Broadsides Online

Submitted by coulson on Sun, 04/15/2012 - 09:09
students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides

As a conclusion to an online research workshop, students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides.

Transforming Video with Popcorn Maker

Submitted by Wise on Fri, 03/07/2014 - 10:40
Popcorn spilling from red and yellow movie-theatre-style box, on a white background

Like many things, visual rhetoric is often best learnt by doing. This lesson plan introduces students to video editing using Popcorn Maker, a web-based tool for mashing up online texts.

Editing Poetry: Manuscript to Printed Page

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 06/11/2012 - 13:01
Manuscripts offer an opportunity to discuss editorial decisions.

Students work on transcribing an Emily Dickenson poem from manuscript form into print. Their transcriptions are then compared with each other and with several printed editions of the same poem and used to discuss editorial decisions.

Introducing Ideology with HSBC Advertisements

Submitted by Cate Blouke on Sat, 08/02/2014 - 21:16
Image of an HSBC advertisement with the same image repeated three times with three different labels

This in-class activity uses the popular HSBC ad campaign (a tryptich of the same image with different value labels) to introduce students to visual rhetoric and ideology. After discussing the ads, students create their own version.

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