technology

Student Comments on Technological Lesson Plans

In the middle of this semester, I decided to do a survey of my students, to see what they had found helpful so far and what I could do to help them get what they wanted out of the rest of the semester. One of the things I discovered from this survey was that the lessons I found most interesting were not necessarily those that the students found most helpful. Two of my three favorite lessons to teach, and two of those that most depend on technology, attracted comments that questioned their utility.

Finding the Sticking-Place: Take Up New Technologies and Unscrew the Cycle of Fear

An overhead projector

There seems to be a tendency when teaching new technologies to slip into simply teaching the tools. When I’m gearing up to assign my students a multimodal project, rather than teaching students to puzzle over and feel out new technologies, I often—with the semester slipping by—take their hands and rush them through some piece of software.

Teaching the (Not So) Tech-Savvy, or, Why My Students Wouldn't Get This Meme

Screenshot of meme featuring an elderly woman looking at computer with text Wikipedia is Down, What Do They Have Against Soap?

When I was informed as to what text we would be engaging in our introductory rhetoric classes this year, I was simultaneously heartened and shaken.  I was heartened because the subject matter of the substantive material we would be engaging was of tremendous import to everyone- as students, as individuals, as participants in the flow of e-commerce. The issues we would be examining were being addressed and discussed right now, by everyone from politicians to niche nerds with alarmist blogs.

Negotiating Student-Instructor Relationships on Facebook

Facebook's wordmark floating in front of a blue background with plants

All young instructors know it: that dreaded moment when a student, former or current, adds you as a "friend" on Facebook. We encourage students to call us by our first names, and cultivate a sense of informal comfort in the classroom. As young people closer in age to our students than our advisors, we also realize that Facebook has become a near-universal social networking outlet, filled not only with friends but cousins, colleagues, and (gulp) parents.

Licensing

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All materials posted to this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. We invite you to use and remix these materials, but please give credit where credit is due. In addition, we encourage you to comment on your experiments with and adaptations of these plans so that others may benefit from your experiences.

 

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