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I am a member of the WPA listserv, which is always a great source of ideas and information.

Recently on the list, one member shared an assignment idea that I thought was worth noting. It is something I’d be interested in using in the future.

Lynn Reid, an adjunct at City College of New York and Brookdale Community College, noted she asks students to create a blog in advocacy for an issue they are reading or writing about. The students are allowed to select their audience, content and format. She requires the students write a formal paper explaining why the student decided to create the blog the way they did as well as discuss how the contributions from the blog informed the larger conversation about the issue.

Reid lets students decide whether to create a real blog or to write a blog-style document.

One of the prewriting skills that I ask my students to practice is freewriting.

The other day, my students were in a computer lab, so I decided to try something different for our freewriting exercise. It is a software program you can use online or pay to download to your computer called “Write or Die.”

It worked great. I had students set a high word count because I wanted them to write for the full time limit. I was able to use the various options — kamikaze and evil options made for some fun (although some panicked too) moments.

http://writeordie.drwicked.com/

Here is a lengthy how-to video:

This article offers a variety of ways social media can be used to help students learn.

http://c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/examples.html

There is a great collection of videos about the Periodic Table of Elements. Each element has its own video.

Check it out: http://www.periodicvideos.com/

I developed this activity for my Freshman English class at Ferris State University.

In the course, students are assigned essays that are written in various modes: narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, process, etc.

Constraints:
One thing I struggle with is helping students find topics that 1) work for the assignment and 2) doesn’t bore the student. For some reason, students fail to utilize their creativity when selecting essay topics. It may have something to do with preconceived notions of English class being boring. I’m not sure.

In addition to this concern, I am very interested in making my essay assignments difficult to plagiarize. This means I usually have to tweak my assignments as well as allow time for prewriting and process writing. Whenever possible, I try to have students develop their topic when they first receive the assignment, so they leave knowing what they will write about (and so do I).

I try to do this, however, without dictating what my students write. I still want the actual topic to be open to student interpretation.

Teaching online requires a lot of writing and reading, which can be overwhelming for students. As a writer, I can usually do a good job of writing a written explanation of a complicated task or concept, but there are some things that are just easier to tell a student rather than write to a student.

For instance, I teach research writing online. One of the things I want to help students learn is how to search for sources online. While many students already know how to use search engines like Google.com, they are less familiar with the resources available from libraries. Even when students are aware of library resources, they aren’t sure how to access those resources. To make it easier, I created a short movie that takes my students through the required steps.

I used my Facebook status updates to create this image.

This free resource lets you create word clouds. The more frequently a word is used, the larger it is in the word cloud. This creates a great visual graphic for text, and you can adjust the font and layout to find the most pleasing version of your word text.

PBS is offering a free lecture video series online, and I thought some of you might be interested in this resource.

When I checked it out, I noticed a number of great videos. The lectures are on a variety of topics and organized by topic, region and period.

http://forum-network.org/

Trying to figure out what digital camera to buy can be overwhelming. The best way to begin figuring out what kind of camera to buy is to figure out what it is you want to do with the camera.