Redemption: Voicethread to the Rescue

Opening up Voicethread the morning after an asynchronous day and finding scores of new comments is like running downstairs on Christmas morning and finding a pile of presents.

Here's my view of all of my Voicethreads:

The yellow comment boxes alert me that there are new comments on those three Voicethreads. Yesterday's classwork. Unlike the Voicethread from three weeks ago, yesterday's was simple and straightforward: comment on the quote sandwich in two of the following paragraphs.

Reason #1 that Voicethread rocks: students can see me as I'm going over the prompt. I've listened to myself on Voicethreads in which I've only given audio prompts; those are fine, but I believe that being able to see me, as dorky as I may look, helps to humanize this activity. It boosts instructor presence, obviously, but it also makes it so that adding an audio comment is less intimidating. If I can add a video comment, students can an audio comment.

Reason #2 that Voicethread rocks: We can hear each other! We're only in a brick and mortar classroom once a week. While many of my online days are synchronous, students can only hear me and my TA, not each other. They type in the chat box or in Googledocs, but it's not the same. Hearing each other's voices helps build "social presence." I ask them to introduce themselves when they start to speak so that subsequent students can reference them by name.

Reason #3 that Voicethread rocks: when recording, we can draw on the slide. 

I'm asking students to point out specific things in paragraphs, so being able to point to the area they're talking about is super helpful. The drawings fade after seven seconds, so the slide doesn't get too cluttered.

Reason #4 that Voicethread rocks: I know immediately if they've understood the lesson. This lesson focuses on the "quote sandwich": how to integrate sources properly in a text. Full rhetorical context, including the main aim of the overall text, the quote (or paraphrase), restate the quote in your own words, analyze the quote, and "forward" it, to use Joseph Harris's term. This lesson was presented in a video lecture I made with Camtasia. I don't use the bells and whistles in Camtasia--the quizzes or polls--so until I started using Voicethread, there was no way for me to know if they truly "got it" (let alone watched it) until I looked over their drafts.

Okay, this could happen through a discussion board, but that wouldn't be nearly as good. They just watched me, in the video, go over several paragraphs, pointing out what is or is not working in the samples. Then, they do the same exact thing in this Voicethread. They didn't read the lesson--they watched me. Practicing in a Voicethread is the most logical way to reinforce what they just learned.

Reason #5 that Voicethread rocks: Students can see the text, listen to each other, and add their audio comments all in the same place. You can't do this with a discussion board.

 Here is a Voicethread from last semester. I've gone back to this one because it doesn't include student work (visually)--they are commenting on political cartoons from October, 2013.

The thumbnails on the left and right of the slide represent seven different students. I'm playing this slide now; you can see that I'm listening to the first student's comment.

How cool is this? I mean, seriously? I'm about to write a proposal for this semester's ITL Conference. I want the entire campus to know about this and to adopt this--I think this is an extraordinarily powerful tool for writing teachers like me, for art/ art history teachers, for architecture, media studies, math--the applications are endless.

Thank you, Voicethread, and thank you, students, for bringing me back to my properly enthusiastic state!

Deflation

My class is impossible.

I essentially teach a year-long course in fifteen weeks, and student rightfully resent it. I have spent almost five years refining my class so that it's manageable, so that students won't freak out, so that they won't turn on me when I introduce the first paper. I have designed a logical, perfect sequence from summary to rhetorical analysis to Inquiry paper.

But we still need one more week. Yesterday should have been devoted to invention: to refining the inquiry to a solid research question, to freewriting, to explaining the dinner party, to introducing the quote sandwich. I love the activity K came up with that we didn't have time for: students would pair up and conduct one-minute interviews with each other. Then, we'd introduce the quote sandwich, and then we'd guide students to create a quote sandwich with a direct quote from the person they just interviewed, and then they'd exchange paragraphs to see how their partner represented them in text. It's a really good exercise--paragraph building with each other's quotes.

Yet we didn't have time for it. Instead, we spent forty minutes workshopping the sample Paper 1 as a class--which went well, at least in two of my three classes--and then fifteen minutes going over the paper itself, how it grows out of the Rhetorical Analysis that was due last night, and how the full draft of Paper 1 is due this Saturday morning (which was changed to midnight in my second two classes).

Students aren't ready. They haven't refined their inquiry question. They don't have all of their sources. They have no idea what they're writing about. It's an impossible task.

My class is impossible.

Students have every right to resent it. Yesterday, I watched as their expressions shifted from openness to shock to deflation to resentment. Tomorrow's asynchronous class has them watching three back to back video lectures that were never designed to be viewed in one day. They're all mine--they will be sick of hearing my voice by the time they get to the Voicethread. It's a boring class, activity-wise, but they need all of that content tomorrow so that they have what they need to finish those drafts.

My class is impossible to like, which hurts me deeply.

Instructor Presence

I love teaching synchronous classes online.

Yes, AdobeConnect isn't perfect. Yes, my wireless can go on the fritz. Yes, a student or two may have a hard time getting into Googledocs.

But I love it all the same. I wouldn't have predicted this two years ago, when I started teaching blended courses, but I really can do things in my synchronous online days that I cannot do face-to-face.

I always give my students ten minutes to get settled on synchronous online days. Most students come in by 9:30, but I don't start the live class until 9:40. This gives students time to run to the library, if they have class just before mine, or time to ask pre-class questions in the chat box. Meanwhile, everyone completes an opening activity:

At 9:40, I start my webcam and come on line. I'm not showing the full screen because doing so will reveal my students' names, which I will not do. But here's me, in my home office, smiling as students type in their warrants to these enthymemes.

I call on three or four students to write their answer in; this prevents students from dozing (or walking away from the computer entirely). "Adam, Beatrice, Connie, David: what's the warrant for the Starbucks enthymeme?...Good...Ernest, Frank, Gertrude, Henrietta, you're on deck for Fox News..." and so forth.

All three classes nailed this, so we quickly moved on to the next piece: finding "Viable" sources. This part was new. The day before, one of my TAs, K, and I were were trying to figure out how to come back to stasis theory in a way that would be most useful to students.

"Maybe..." I suddenly thought, "maybe I should make some sort of presentation that walks students through the research process, like Narrowing Topic --> Finding better sources --> evaluating sources --> choosing the most useful sources, as in the ones with actual arguments--> adding those sources to your stasis grid. Maybe?"

"YES!" K responded. "Students will definitely find that useful, 'cause most of them are like "what is this stasis thing and why am I doing it. This will totally be helpful."

"Okay. I'm on it."

I made a rough map, popped it into Google Presentations, and asked my TAs to help by finding images and making the presentation pretty. K added a lot, and I worked on it until 1 am (of course). It worked out. After walking through the presentation and taking a sudden detour into Academic Search Premier, I explained exactly what to do with their "top" sources: enter them on the grid, like this:

After students identified the two categories with the most claims and questions, they went into their group Googledocs from a couple of weeks ago to find a two-source stasis grid for them to fill out with two of their sources:

2/19 - Stasis Grid

	author/publication/date	categorical	definitional	causal	value	action	jurisdiction
Source 1
Source 2

They had about twelve minutes to do this (my second two classes did, anyway; we were short on time in the first class), and my TAs and I watched them in their Googledocs while I kept an eye on the AdobeConnect chat box in case students had questions. I put myself on mute for this activity, unmuting myself halfway through for "You guys are all doing great! About five more minutes" and then "okay, we're about two minutes away..."

And then, when everyone came back into AdobeConnect, I explained that they would copy this activity into their own stasis grids that was part of their homework this weekend. Six sources in the stasis grid by Monday.

And voila. Toulmin + Finding and Evaluating Viable Sources + Stasis Grid Lesson Accomplished.

Why do I love days like this? Because it was a research-focused day. Student had to be on their laptops to search in Google and Academic Search Premier and then work on their stasis grids. Why would I do that in a face-to-face class? I want students to be talking with each other when we're face to face, not staring at their laptops. This is a perfect synchronous online day lesson plan. They need me, a live instructor with a face and a voice, to walk them through Google and especially Academic Search Premier, to show them Diigo and Storify and Pocket, to reinforce why stasis theory is useful. If this had been an asynchronous day, many students would have either been confused, completely lost, or wouldn't have done it at all.

This is what blended learning and teaching looks like with Team Lyra. I love it.

Macklemore, the Rhetorical Triangle, and Toulmin Logic

I did it!

Yesterday's lesson plan was awesome. Why? Because half of it was designed by one of my TAs. My newest TA, to be specific.

Last week, I subbed for 388V, the "how to be a TA" seminar. In it, the TAs/ students split into groups and came up with a lesson plan. The lesson plan that my TA's group came up with was so awesome that I told her I wanted to use it this Monday.

TA Lesson Plan from 388V: The Rhetorical Triangle

1. 4 minutes of a video clip covering the Grammy weddings. In 388V, the TAs used a video clip of an "Entertainment Tonight Style" host recapping the performance. I adapted it to be a video clip of the actual performance: Macklemore "Same Love" Grammys 2014 (3:22 to 6:00)
2. Ask students to ID the message, speaker, and audience
3. Draw the rhetorical triangle and explain how the three points relate to each other

This is essentially where the TAs in 388V stopped. Here's how I adapted it for yesterday:

Continuation: From Rhetorical Triangle to Toulmin Logic

1. Ask "What would happen if we changed one of these? What if the audience were different?" What if the audience was a group who was not supportive of gay marriage?"
2. Use "a conservative congregation" as the new audience.
3. Would Macklemore and Queen Latifah be good speakers for this audience? Would they be able to deliver this message as effectively? No? Why not? Okay, who would be a good speaker?
4. ID reverend/ preacher (all three sections came up with this on their own). 
5. Pairs: In pairs, come up with the best way to deliver this message to this audience. Frame it as a complete enthymeme: a claim + reason. (2 minutes)
6. Ask pairs to give their claim and reason. Write on the board. Have class ID which claim and reason would be the strongest and why.

As they were evaluating the enthymemes, the students discussed the values and beliefs of the audience. "Yes, invoking God is a good idea because..." or "No--don't invoke God. Make it about equality." "So, separate church and state?" "Yes, that's the only way this will work for them." "No, that's not enough--this needs to be about Christian values.."

Brilliant. "Okay, what you guys have just done is figured out which values and beliefs to appeal to in order for the audience to accept the message. In so doing, you've completed the enthymeme with the warrant.

Enthymeme: Claim + Stated Reason. That's your skeleton of the argument. In order to make sure it works, you need to identify the unstated assumption, or warrant, embedded in the enthymeme.

Complete Argument:               Claim + Stated Reason

                                                            Warrant

Bingo. Then, students took out their homework exercise, in which they had identified the claims and stated reasons for two articles that made arguments about their research topic, and worked on identifying the warrants in those arguments in groups.

After a few minutes, I wrote a couple of their enthymemes on the board and we identified the warrants as a class, e.g., 

Orca whales should not be kept in captivity because no killer whale has ever killed a human in the wild.

Warrant: Only animals who have killed a human in the wild should be kept in captivity.

And so forth. Tomorrow: back to stasis theory and evaluating sources, with a splash of Toulmin for reinforcement. Both stasis theory and Toulmin logic will be reinforced almost daily for several weeks--these take awhile to really click. But the triumph: both concepts are in by Week 4!

Lofty Ambitions: How Much Theory Can I Introduce in One Week?

Well, that depends.

What's my objective? To stick to my syllabus? To frontload the theory before students tackle the first major paper? Or to ensure that students are learning the material in a manageable way?

Hm, I don't know. The last one seems like a laudable goal. Some might say it's the only important goal up there. In fact, I'm one of them.

Look: the stuff I teach is harder than students expect. It's harder than most people imagine when I tell them what I teach. First-year college writing: two parts process writing and one part research skills blended with peer review and served with a slice of grammar and punctuation?

Sure, I do all that. I also teach argument theory, digital literacy, and rhetorical awareness and analysis. That doesn't happen quickly, as I am grudgingly remembering this week.

The first two weeks were devoted to rhetorical context and summary. As I stand here at the end of Week 3, I'm rethinking that unit--I'm asking them to summarize an argument before they even know how an argument works. Whatever--I'll revisit that at some point. I need them writing within the first week, and the articles I choose at the top of the semester are easy enough to digest:

We start with two sample summaries of Gabriel's 2010 Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. Then, groups of students summarized either Steve Kolowich's 2011 What Students Don't Know, Peg Tyre's 2012 The Writing Revolution, or Josh Keller's 2009 Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers. 

This past Monday, they submitted an individual summary on either Carr's Is Google Making us Stupid, Shaahin Cheyene's 2012 How the Internet is Changing our Brain or Clive Thompson's 2012 Is Google Wrecking Our Memory, which they'd already discussed in a Lyra Classic: an overcomplicated discussion board prompt that asked them to put their article in conversation with Eli Pariser's Ted Talk on Internet Filters (everyone needs to watch this--everyone--and assign it in class. Do it because we all need to know this, and do it because the discussion that this generates is brilliant).

I asked them to submit these summaries as an ungraded assignment. I've never done this before--it's usually associated with maybe ten lousy points--but I like it. I told them that this was their chance to receive feedback from me before handing something in for a grade. Makes sense, right?

Back to my dilemma: I introduced stasis theory last Monday, which is easy enough to do in fifteen minutes. The trick is to follow up with it well in the next class. This went okay yesterday, but I was more distracted by the fact that students clearly didn't grasp rhetorical context--that thing I've been pounding every day for three weeks now--and had to. I spent more time on that by tying it in with the other big piece of yesterday: simple online research skills. It was an online synchronous day in AdobeConnect, so we all hit Google and searched for a few things. We got to reinforce Pariser--"Who has a different results page than I do?" and then go over simple things like using quotation marks and filtering for dates (2011..2014). And then we got to the good stuff, which I hadn't even planned on:

"Okay, before I even click on this link--what do I know about this article? Here's my results page, and I've taken three nanoseconds to decide I want to click on this one. Why? What am I looking for?"

The most important clue: "Where is it published? What can we detect from the website? That's the first step. What else? Date. Okay. Let's click on it. Here's the link in the AdobeConnect chat box so that you can go to this article on your own computer. Alright, let's check this out. I've never read this article before. Let's pretend that we've all been assigned a short, 750-word assignment about blended learning in college. A basic expository piece to be published in The Diamondback next week. Take a few seconds to scan this. Would you use this source?"

This was not in my lesson plan. But this was the perfect way to introduce (introduce?!! Then why didn't I do this on Day 2?) rhetorical context. Now they get it (I hope. I should still reinforce it Monday so that it totally sticks...). But in essence, they've got it. Great. So then the trick was to bounce from there to stasis theory, picking up from Monday, which I thought they could nail as preparation for...

...Toulmin theory this Monday?

I must be Out. Of. My. Mind.

Stay tuned for Major Syllabus Adjustment #1 in Spring 2014.

How to Blog Like a Social Media Intern

Clarification: Social Media Intern for the Smithsonian. 

Courtney is back with me on an independent study this semester. She is researching all things blended learning, boosting our online presence, and teaching me how to conduct myself online.

Observe:

My strategy for "conducting myself online" thus far has to be private. I've been blogging for three years now, but haven't published anything. I have been waiting until I know that I can blog on a regular basis. More importantly, I have been waiting until I've had content I truly wanted to share. I've read hundreds of blogs over the last decade, and too many of them haven't been updated in months, or even years. Many of them seem to have been created as a requirement for grad students or first-year teachers. "Why blog?" "Because I have to." "Oh. So...what are you going to write about?"

"I dunno. The view from my window?"

That's pretty much how I started. I had to experiment with it in order to figure out what I was doing. I was blogging for myself. Now, however, I do have content I want to share: lesson plans, discussion board prompts, advice for teachers transitioning to blended/ hybrid courses, enthusiasm for my classes and my students who are creating better and better writing every semester.

Courtney sat down with me yesterday and assumed the most diplomatic voice she could muster: 

"A good rule of thumb for blogs is to keep them short: 600-800 words."

I cringed. "I know, I know. I can't believe how long my posts are!"

"And pictures. You need pictures. College Tourist requires that I write 1,000 word posts, but I fill them with pictures. Here, let me show you."

She hopped on my laptop and led me here: Ten Ways to Find and Land the Perfect Internship

Yes, that's right: my "web content and social media" research assistant also happens to be the social media intern for the Smithsonian. She's a rock star. And I am the luckiest educator on the planet.

"Pictures? I don't have any pictures! I don't even have a decent profile picture!" (True words).

"Right. Well, work on that. You need them."

Here you go, Courtney: 

That's my class schedule for the next two weeks. Speaking of which, I need to prepare tomorrow's synchronous class on research skills and stasis theory. 

How's this? Better?

Epiphanic Fridays: Five Powerful Reasons to Respond to Your Students' Initial Discussion Board Posts

I just finished responding to the "Introductions and Writing Habits" Discussion Board for one of my three sections. It's time-consuming, yes, but invaluable. Here's why:

Value #1: My students deserve to be seen. My TAs respond to each student, and students respond to each other, but students really need to hear from me, too (which I haven't always done in the past). I teach blended sections, so students only see me in a brick and mortar classroom once a week. The prompt this semester enabled me to do a lot:

The purpose of this discussion board is to get to know each other better, to reflect on your experiences with writing and learning, and to discuss your goals for this course.

What kinds of writing do you do the most? What do you enjoy the most? The least? What writing habits have worked well for you in the past that you can continue to employ this semester? What difficulties with writing (think broad--this can also include researching, studying, time management, etc.) would you like to overcome? What can we (your classmates, the TA, and Lyra) do that would help you meet your goals this semester?

Primary posts (due Wednesday by midnight): write a 200-250 word post introducing yourself to the class. Include the following:

• The things you shared about yourself in class (name, where you’re from, etc.)
• A reflection about your writing experiences (based on the questions above).
• A picture of yourself: How to add a picture to your Canvas profile

Secondary posts (due by class on Monday): Respond to the posts of two of your classmates, identifying things you share in common, if applicable, and offering feedback and strategies for how each classmate could meet his or her semester goals.

(Basic takeaways: we all struggle with writing and students are resources for each other)

Value #2: I know my students much better than I usually do this early in the semester. Reading and responding to their writing habits and challenges has enabled me to see who likes/ doesn't like analysis and research, who outlines, who prefers creative writing, who struggles with time management and distractions (don't we all!), and so forth. As evidence: I can identify at least one thing about most of my students in my first two sections, but don't feel as though I know anyone in my third section yet. Why? Because I haven't started responding to their Intro posts.

Value #3: Students get to know me. The more curious students will likely read more than one of my responses (especially after this weekend's announcement, in which I will encourage them to do so). Throughout the nineteen responses, I covered things like where I've lived, where I've traveled, what I like to write, and especially how I approach the writing and research process. Rumor and research has it that students appreciate seeing their teachers as human beings.

Value #4 (HUGE): Students get a very good sense of exactly what we're going to do this semester. If anyone reads through all of my responses, they will:

• know what the first paper is all about,
• understand why we're starting with summary and analysis and how that leads to the first paper,
• understand why I'm asking them to respond to each other's posts, 
• understand the difference between "looking for" something specific in a text (e.g. rhetorical context) and responding to one of my questions versus responding to the actual ideas (such, such a good distinction to make...) and how that relates to the first paper, 
• know that they're going to start researching their semester project next week,
• know that we will spend a LOT of time on research strategies and tips (which they all want),
• know that I am militant about concision and that I will help them with that,
• know that I help them with time management by setting multiple due dates for partial drafts and full drafts,
• know that they have a full week to revise their papers after the in-class draft workshops,
• know that they will write different kinds of arguments for different audiences, both academic and public (online), and
• know that I care deeply about what we do in this course and about making sure they learn what they need to learn to succeed in the rest of their college classes. More than once I mentioned that I revamp the syllabus and many assignments every semester, something I hope students understand works out quite well in their favor.

That's a lot of good information. Now, most of that is written in the syllabus and the "General Course Overview and FAQs" page on Canvas, our LMS, but I'd wager a bet that students will get more out of my responses here than whatever they skimmed (or didn't) last week. They theoretically read four or five syallabi last week. Reinforcing several concepts here in the DB, after they've gotten to know me and the class for a couple of weeks, will likely make a lot of my information stick.

Value #5 (GINORMOUS): I just solved one of the biggest mysteries of teaching writing.

I've been helping students with writer's block for seven years. I discuss my process--just sit down to write--and explain how that leads to figuring out what I think (Didion). Classic Elbow, Murray, Lamott--everyone. Puke drafts. 

That's good advice--it's helped a lot of students. But after reading and responding to at least ten students who struggle with "just getting started" and "staring at the screen forever," reminding a couple of students about what they learned in Graff and Birkenstein last week (Burke/ Entering a Conversation), and then reading one student's post about what his wife (an attorney) recommends (start with your research notes), it came to me: 

People, it's not about you. It is never about you. It's not about you, a blank screen, and your ideas.

You're writing to figure out what you think (yes) about other people's ideas. 

Okay, duh--I talk about this all the time in class. But what I say in class probably isn't in students' minds when they sit down to draft. 

Epiphany and Praxis:

Students, when you open up a new document for your papers, this is what you're going to do: you're going to copy your one-sentence summaries of all of the sources on your working bibliographies and paste them directly into the document. That's your starting place. You're going to look at these six ideas and then you're going to start your puke draft. Just. Write. Responses. To. These. Six. Ideas.

Cue forwarding ideas and synthesizing sources. Cue puke draft that doesn't feel as terrifyingly unorganized as a creative writer's puke draft.

After seven years, I just came to this now?? Yeah, yeah. The big takeaway that I will discuss on Monday with this class: I didn't get here until I had responded to everyone. It came to me within thirty minutes of getting up and doing something else. It was through responding ten times about the writing and research process, and reading the advice given to one of my students--that it all clicked. And that's what I mean by writing in order to figure out what you think. 

I'm wicked excited about this! Maybe not revelatory to anyone else, but I know that some students simply can't just write cold, no matter what I say about writing just for your own eyes first (Stephen King), or putting a manilla folder over the screen so that you aren't staring at your own words, or whatever--this doesn't work for every student. I suspect this strategy will. Staring at the one-sentence summaries of arguments you're about to engage with is a concrete reminder that as a writer, you are never alone. You are always writing in response to someone else's ideas, just like I'm doing right now. You're not "defending" your own argument--you're developing it based on what you've learned. Pasting the one-sentence summaries on the page will reinforce this core concept--it will literally put the "They Say/ I Say" right there in front of them. 

Brilliant. 

Name one other exercise in which you can do all of the above without writing responses to every student that every person in class can see. I'd love to know what you do!

Incredible Voicethread!

Okay, I've only listened to two slides so far in just one of my sections, but what I've heard is incredible! These are the moments that make all of the hours it takes to prepare an asynchronous day--a *good* asynchronous day--worth it. Voicethreads don't necessarily take too terribly long to prepare, but because this was our first one of the semester, I had to add a couple of slides just about what Voicethread is and how to use it.

The longest preparation time was designing and explaining the prompt. This is definitely a "Lyra Classic": A hyper-organized, hyper-specific prompt with assigned summaries to comment on and elaborate points to cover. Each student had to respond to two summaries--one on the article they did their own summary on and one on an article they did not read. The prompts for each response were different. I had to write that all out, make sure I assigned groups to the right summaries, and record myself on my webcam walking them through all of the prompts. On a couple of them, the amount of times I say "um" is horrible--absolutely horrible--but because it took me about six hours to put all of this together, I did not rerecord those slides. I did have a script for some of the slides, but not all of them. Yes, scripts help to cut down on the "ums." More later--I just wanted to quickly shout out how impressed I am with my students on only their fourth day of class!

Timing Lesson Plans

I never leave enough time in my lesson plans. Like ever.

It's not for lack of planning: I write them all out--to the time. I rewrite all of my lesson plans, even lessons that I know are successful. So how did I run out of time yesterday?

Okay, this is what happened: I didn't have time to go over the one-sentence summaries from last Wednesday, so I tried to put them into yesterday's lesson plan, which really didn't work. Observe:

:00 Quiz
:05 One-Sentence Summaries from last week
:15 Aims/ Methods/ Materials
:20 Group Summaries: Module 2 → “How to Write a Summary”
:45-50: One-sentence  summaries w/ diff sent. struct.
:00-05: PCA Wed (asynch/ Voicethread)

Stop laughing.

Okay, the quiz actually was just five minutes. Super easy, most true/ false or multiple choice, like what's the TA's name, where is my office (one of the options was Florida), and then some fairly simple concept questions (like rhetorical context, which actually most students did not get, despite the fact that I went over it last Wednesday and it was in the WA homework. I honestly don't know why so many students missed that one--anyone? Insight/ tips?)

The one-sentence summaries: I did go over them in my first class, which of course took ten minutes, not five. Reinforced the precise verbs, putting the author as the grammatical subject, and that the information in the one-sentence version needs to include rhetorical context and authorial intent/ message. This is *your* thesis statement about the text. This is also...

...The "Aims" in Joseph Harris's Aims/ Methods/ Materials. Methods and Materials are basically the construction and the tools (Methods --> how the author builds the text; Materials --> with what (tools, or evidence). Methods and materials are what gets included in a paragraph summary.

That went well in my first class...except that it of course took twenty-five minutes, not fifteen. That said, packing sentence structure, precise verbs, does/ says, and aims/ methods/ materials in twenty-five minutes isn't half bad. I just don't know why I thought I could do it in fifteen.

So, writing a group summary takes forty minutes, not thirty. And I actually knew this--I remember this from last semester (and the one before, for that matter). So, in my second and third classes, I cut the one-sentence summaries from last week, a choice I don't like because I wasn't able to integrate this class as tightly with the last one--and because that opening fifteen minutes really was helpful in my first class. So, the net result is that my first class was stressed that they didn't have enough time to finish their summaries (they finished them by midnight) and my second two classes didn't get to see me discuss their sentences and how that relates to aims/ methods/ materials.

Moreover--and this is arguably the biggest fallout--cutting into those last fifteen minutes means that I run out of time for "context" notes, like explaining why we're doing what we're doing, how this relates to what we did last week/ what we will do next week. I also lose really key "housekeeping" notes, like explaining that my TAs and I work as a team, my TA "office lounge," and things like class notes, which I haven't yet talked about at all!

So: I'm writing Monday's lesson plan already and need to save myself 20 minutes to go over all the auxiliary details that I haven't had time to yet. Maybe 25. That will work--it's the first day after the add/ drop period ends, so Monday's students will officially have committed themselves to the class.

I might post Monday's lesson plan here first for C and R to comment on, as they've both TAd twice and know all too well the gap between my ambition and what is realistic in the classroom.

So, tomorrow is our first asynchronous day. Student's are watching K's Summary Video and then doing a Voicethread in which they're responding to each other's group summaries from yesterday. The Voicethread doesn't explicitly incorporate the Summary video, unfortunately (that's always the ideal with video lectures--students need to do something with them to make them relevant), but it's set up pretty well. My TAs are doing a "demo" slide so that after the first slides where I explain how Voicethread works, students can see a slide in action. I'm excited for this one--I think it will be cool for students to hear each other comment on each other's summaries instead of just writing about them in a discussion board, as they have in the past. This makes it more real.

I still want to do something with those sentences...I don't know what. Put them all somewhere and have students revise them? Possibly. Where--a Discussion Board (meh). A Googledoc? Maybe. I could do that sentence structure thing, i.e., revise this twice, one by opening with these two words ("In the...") and the other with ("Writing for..."). These are LAST week's one-sentence summaries (all of Gabriel), so in theory, they know more now about good one-sentence summaries.

Yeah....but then they'll all be exactly the same. They should really do them with the new articles. Maybe it can be in two parts: revise someone else's sentences in two ways, and then revise your group's Gabriel sentence from last week in two ways.

Hm. I might like this. This saves me from having to beat this into the ground next Monday, and gets rid of that holdover item from last Wednesday.

Okay. That's what I'll do then. Video + Voicethread + Sentence-level edits in a Googledoc. Good.