Teaching to the Tech

Or teaching in spite of it, really.

Yesterday was our first online class of the semester. I always start with a synchronous online day so that students acclimate to the online environment as quickly as possible. I've been using Adobe Connect for almost a year now. It's not perfect (the layouts aren't malleable; students don't have as many "status indicators" as they do in Wimba and Big Blue Button), but it works. That's what I care about the most: it works.

What didn't work yesterday? Our power. The power went out about an hour and a half before classes started. I had set the opening slide up in Adobe Connect and written out the lesson plan in excruciating detail for my TAs, but I hadn't set up the group Googledocs for the first class, which I had wanted to do because my TA for the first class, S, is new. No power = no internet.

Crap.

O looked outside and reported that the whole block was down. We've only lost power here once--also about an hour before a synchronous online day--and it had come back fairly quickly. But still. Did I want to go into work with O? Set up in his office? No...I had too much prep work to do still. I'd lose half an hour just getting to his office and setting up--that wouldn't work. I'd be incredibly flustered.

"If only I'd replaced my phone by now...I'd have 4G," I said ruefully. I can get a new iPhone for free--I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

"How charged is your phone? You could try hotspot, though I don't know if you'll have enough battery power for five hours. Well, wait, hold on..."

Bingo. Within fifteen minutes, I was back online through Bluetooth and was charging both my phone and my laptop on a car battery that O just so happens to have around. Partners with skills = win.

The power came back on at 9:28, but by then I was already in the classroom and didn't want to risk getting disconnected while switching over to the wireless. I ended up teaching all three classes on the Bluetooth connection. Students reported that my voice would break up a little bit, but not so much that they couldn't understand me. They spent half the class working in groups in Googledocs anyway, so my voice wasn't necessary the whole time.

About those Googledocs? S set them all up successfully without me prompting her. She rocks! Reason #87 to work with former students--S knew exactly what it looked like to work in Gdocs on an online day--she was my student just two semesters ago. She knew what needed to be done and just did it. Plus, my ridiculously detailed lesson plan helped all of us. It was like four pages long, complete with color-coded, italicized cues: TA pastes prompt into demo Googledoc... TA and Lyra model working in Gdocs, making margin comments, using the chat feature...

It totally worked. The detailed LP helped all of us (my TAs and me), and demoing Gdocs live was super easy and, I think, helpful. In the past, I've made a short video on how to use Gdocs, but really--who watches my video tutorials? From what I can tell, no one. Yesterday was much better because within 90 seconds, students watched me create and work in a Gdoc with my TA. That's all they needed. Plus, of course, at least half of my students are experienced Gdoc users, so they could lead the others if necessary.

As for the group activity: I kept it super simple. First, I used the Reading Guide to ask a couple of questions to the class while we were all still in Adobe Connect. "Okay, if your first name begins with a letter between A and M, please answer the following in the chat box: did Summary #1 give you a solid sense of who Gabriel is? Why he wrote this? Where it was published? What his purpose is? .... Everyone else: you're on deck with the same question for Summary #2."

Once we'd done that warm up in AdobeConnect, students hopped over to their Googledocs, where we had pasted in one of the two summaries and a prompt. The prompt asked them to evaluate how well the summary articulated the rhetorical context and main message of the original article. Then, students had to summarize Gabriel in just one sentence. Finally, students had to explain in a couple of sentences why their one-sentence summary was more effective than the sample paragraph summary.

I had allotted ten minutes for this; it was really more like 15-20. That was fine; I still had enough time to paste a couple of the one-sentence versions into the whiteboard in AdobeConnect and touch on strong active verbs. I then said that we'd finish this up on Monday. I need to show all six sentences from all six groups so that students see their work being discussed (I haven't always been good about this--in fact, I'm usually awful about group work follow up, which is bad).

In my last class, right after wrapping up the one-sentence summary analysis and right before showing them the homework and ending class, I asked all students to type one main "takeaway" from today's class: "Type one thing that you learned today--one thing that I emphasized as clearly important." That was awesome, and I plan on doing that in every AdobeConnect class from here on out. And it makes so much sense! It's a chance for every student to do something visibly before leaving class. And it's an example of an effective reinforcement tactic I can do online and can't do face-to-face. I can hardly ask all 19 students to shout out something simultaneously in person--but they can certainly all write and post in the chat box at the same time. Win.

Monday, we'll pick up with those sentences, then I'll talk about Aims/ Methods/ Materials, and then students will write a group summary of their assigned article in about thirty minutes, which will theoretically be possible because I've given them an obscenely through preparation activity to bring into class (a does/ says analysis). Finally--and this is what I'm wicked excited about--once students have completed their paragraph summaries, each student in the group will write a one-sentence version of their own summary with a specified sentence structure: Each member of the group (3 or 4) has to choose a different opening for their one-sentence summary:

1. "In the..."
2. "Writing for..."
3. "In his..."
4. "Trip Gabriel..."

So excited! This gives us an opportunity to talk about grammar in a fun, practical way: grammar is about choices and effects. Here, the one-sentence summary requires them to shove a lot of content into one sentence (rhetorical context and thesis statement), which can be tricky. Students make grammatical mistakes on this a lot--these are the sentences that start out one way and end another way, as though they've forgotten the structure in which they began. This simple activity will show them a) why this sentence is hard, grammatically, and b) how they can play around with sentence structure to make it all work. I can, time permitting, get in prepositional phrases and end focus. Adjectivals and adverbials will need to wait for another day--which is best, because we will have hit cognitive overload by now.

Did I mention how excited I am about this? So excited! Fly-by grammar that is tethered to an actual activity that only takes 3-4 minutes to complete and has an obvious practical application.

Stay tuned for Tuesday's report on how this worked!

Full Circle

This week marks two years since I started teaching blended versions of first-year composition. Yesterday, on the first day of the semester, I found myself in the same building and room as one of my very first blended classes two years ago. Back then, I didn't know if the blended design would work. I didn't even know how it would work, really, and tried to say as much to my new students. "So, we're basically guinea pigs," I remember one of them saying. "Mmm...I prefer 'pioneers,'" I had replied.

Two years ago, I also started working with UTAs--undergraduate teaching assistants. I didn't know how that would work, either. I remember entering my first class: I walked over to the computer, across the room from the door, set down my bags, removed my coat. I turned around and watched as my TA assumed her seat at the table in front of the chalkboard, facing the students. I froze, taken aback at how comfortable she seemed as she set up her laptop; she looked as though she had been TAing as long as I had been teaching. It hadn't occurred to me that E would park herself there, where I normally set out my books, notebooks, and syllabi. I had never shared the class with anyone. Would this work?

In the second class, in the adjacent room that I returned to yesterday, C, my next TA entered just before classes started. She sat down in the front row uncertainly. I silently invited her to the front, behind the table, like E had done two hours prior. Within just two hours, this now felt normal.

Yesterday, I met with my fifteenth TA that I have worked with in just these two short years. This time, I met her in my office in the adjacent building and we walked over together. This time, I had prepared S, telling her that she would sit at that table, telling her that I would hand her the roster when students introduced themselves, telling her that I would direct certain questions to her when students asked them and that I would frequently ask her to chime in when I explained to students how this wildly different class would unfold. Our new students were no longer guinea pigs or pioneers; rather, they were the lucky recipients of two years of dramatic changes, radical redesign, and endless experimentation. Unlike E and C, S had not only taken a blended class with me--just one year ago--she had also taken it with a TA. S knew exactly what it was like to take this class, to work with a TA and myself, to work in AdobeConnect, to sit in a brick and mortar classroom just once per week.

I continue to hyper-analyze every single lesson plan, bouncing it off of or, more frequently, designing it with "Team Lyra," my current team of TAs. I will never stop experimenting with every lesson plan, every set of homework, every detail of our course website. The first couple of weeks of class, devoted to defining "Academic Writing" and "Academic Habits of Mind," reading critically and summarizing effectively, has been the same for two years, but each semester, I make adjustments.

Tonight, for example, students aren't just reading two sample summaries; they're also consulting a "Reading Guide" explaining what a good summary should do and what to look for. Prior to this semester, it hadn't occurred to me to prepare them for the subsequent class discussion with a guide, an oversight that is almost laughable. How could I expect students to know what to look for in a summary when the whole point of this opening module is to teach them how to summarize at the college level? For two years, I've assigned the summaries and conducted the in-class discussion, and students have stared blankly, knowing that the samples are lacking something but not knowing precisely what: rhetorical context, the difference between what the author being summarized is saying and doing, and the author's "aims, methods, and materials"(Joseph Harris). I explain all of this in class, but by then, students have struggled more than necessary. Why not give them some help in advance? That way, the discussion will be richer, more focused, and more purposeful. Students won't walk in (or log in, rather) tomorrow confused (or, at least, not as confused as they have been). In theory, they'll be prepared to compare the sample summaries with the actual text (Trip Gabriels' now famous 2010 NYT "Plagiarism Lines Blur in the Digital Age" article) and identify why the summaries fall short.

This is my hypothesis, anyway. I'll let you know how it works out!