This course has been the roughest of all my grad classes to
date. Going into the class, I expected that I was going to breeze through all
the assignments because I am considered a very competent tech human at my
school. I was blown away by this class. I feel like in some other classes I
learned about teaching practices or strategies; in this course I learned about
myself, about how much I did not know, and how much technology there is out
there that I have never even remotely used. This course has already changed my
teaching and it is not even over!
My GAME plan focused on my student’s group commercial
project. They are currently working on this (and hating me because they have
two projects back-to-back (one of which is over break)). I was / am really
hoping that this project where they are identifying a product, audience, and
rhetorical appeals is going to make their out-of-class project a touch easier.
Based on what I really want out of this project (which is to utilize the
students’ understanding of persuasive techniques), I would love to have started
this whole project earlier in the unit. We talked about all of the components
of persuasion as we went through the unit, but I would have tied more into the
“now you do it” aspect along the way.
I changed my plan as I began to implement the project with
the class: After introducing the project, I had each student individually come
up with a product idea and the beginnings for persuading (indentifying audience
and rhetorical appeals). When the students next meet, they will share ideas and
then discard some, forming groups to work on the best commercial ideas. I think
moving from model to individual to group is going to work out better than I had
originally planned.
The other aspect I may change in the future is where the work for this project takes
place. For their “big” solo project, the majority of work is online. For this
commercial project, the totality of the work will be in class. The next time we
do this project, I think I will split the work between online and in class to
better make a step between “normal” work and what they will be doing solo over
break.
I am really excited to starting using more of these
techniques and activities in class. The next time we introduce a new author or
a new time period, I think I will be creating a digital story as the
background. After I do one for the students, I want them to be able to mimic my
work as they will eventually use this tool to introduce their peers to other
American writers.
