Teaching with Technology

Online Teaching and Inspiration for Classroom Adjustments

I’ve taught courses online during summer sessions for the past several years. I find it a challenge, and I’m constantly retooling the courses to make sure that students are getting the most out of the experience — and particularly to make sure that I’m providing enough resources for the students who are in the course, beyond my responses to their exams and their written work.

So over the past few years, I’ve been slowly adding features to my online courses. When I first began to do this, I simply used discussion boards, my personal blog (as opposed to lecturing), and exams with essay questions. Last year, I began adding short video lectures to my courses — I simply use pre-loaded software on my MacBook to record, and then upload everything to my YouTube channel. This year, along with those video lectures I added narrated PowerPoints about important literary terms, which were uploaded to my Google Drive and linked to through our Moodle page. I also had students write daily journal responses (informal), weekly blog posts (a bit more formal), and interpretive papers (most formal of all). And this summer I finally figured out how to create a timed exam in Moodle.

In previous summers, I’ve taught 200-level courses designed for and taken by English majors. This summer was the first where I’ve taught the introduction to literature course as an online course. In thinking about how it went, I’ve recognized a few things about the problems of online education, but I’ve also begun to think about how I can incorporate some of these features into my traditional classroom in the coming academic year.

First: the downside. Having all the material online — and having students do the work asynchronously — means that students must be extremely motivated to get everything done, and that includes watching the videos. While I tried to keep most of the videos brief (fewer than 10 minutes), I admit that some of them went longer than that. Because I use YouTube to store all the videos, I can also see how often they were viewed, and in some cases, it was rarely or not at all. This definitely constitutes a problem, particularly for students who are unused to textual analysis of literature. I realized in reading the journals and blog posts that students were simply not getting some things. Even though I make it a point to avoid complaining about my students publically (only praising them for their awesome work), I actually reached a point where I complained on Twitter something to the effect of “Anyone who thinks online education is the way to go has never taught Yeats online.”

So, teaching introduction to literature, when the students don’t make use of all the materials available, has the possibility of being disappointing. Nevertheless the experience of teaching online — and trying out the different tools at my disposal — does give me some ideas about how to more effectively use our Learning Management System during the regular academic year.

One thing that I’m considering is moving the exams online, rather than taking up time in the classroom for them. This would be particularly useful in my survey course (British Literature before 1798), because I typically run an exam after every major time period — and we lose two class days to those. I could reclaim those days for more readings, or those could be days of workshopping student papers. It’s a matter of mashing those 1,000 years of literature into 15 weeks.

Another thing that might be useful is to create short (5 minute) videos about some of the literature, highlighting the most essential ideas that we’ve covered in class, or talking about things that are essential for students to understand. For example, when talking about Chaucer, I talk to the students about what Middle English sounds like — but what if I were to have a short video (or audio) linked to the Moodle page so that students could go back to it? Or what if I were to have narrated PowerPoints talking about important literary or historical terms for that survey course? While I certainly want students to continue to develop their note taking skills, I’m probably most concerned with making sure they know the material and can use it in the classroom.

While I don’t know which of these things I’m going to incorporate into my courses — particularly that survey course — in the fall, I think it’s important to be open to better ways to connect the students with the ideas. I certainly don’t want the tech to obscure the teaching — but rather I want to let it be a tool towards a better educational experience for my students.

The Bits Blog on Literature

The Bedford Bits blog provides instructors with teaching ideas from leading scholars, authors, and professors, focusing on composition generally, while LitBits was created just for literature instructors. However, sometimes the great contributors on Bits have approaches and perspectives that are equally useful in the literature classroom.

For this week’s post, we have gathered a collection of great posts on poetry, using technology and culture to engage students, and writing as a social action.

Holly Pappas, Gen Ed Poetry: Finding a Real Toad or Two

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/literature/gen-ed-poetry-finding-a-real-toad-or-two/archived/

Holly Pappas offers an assignment that will help engage students who are overwhelmed by or bored with poetry, and explains to her students that they don’t need perfect understanding to appreciate what is happening in a poem.

Joelle Hahn, Poetry, Proliferating

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/poetry-proliferating/archived/

Technology has made an undeniable impact on the written word, and Joelle presents a variety of online resources for navigating online poetry.

Traci Gardner, Using Pop Culture to Hook Students on Poetry

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/teaching-with-technology/using-pop-culture-to-hook-students-on-poetry/tgardner/

Song lyrics, commercial jingles, and Dr. Seuss all play a role in Traci Gardner’s plan to entice students into loving poetry.

Andrea Lunsford/Jeanne Law Bohannon, Multimodal Mondays: Day in the Life: A DIY Assignment Using Immediate Media, Archives, and Animation to Engage Student-Scholars in Digital, Public Writing

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/multimodal-mondays-day-in-the-life-a-diy-assignment-using-immediate-media-archives-and-animation-to-engage-student-scholars-in-digital-public-writing/alunsford/

An explanation of how Twitter, Storify, and Go Animate bring digital learning and literacy to the classroom.

Traci Gardner, A List of Ten Inspired by Literary Starbucks

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/assignment-idea-2/a-list-of-ten-inspired-by-literary-starbucks/tgardner/

Traci Gardner uses Literary Starbucks as a model, creating an assignment that allows students to playfully explore the minds and characters of great literary figures.

Michael Michaud, Writing is a Public Act: Take One

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/michael-michaud/writing-is-a-public-act-take-one/archived/

In this exploration of how the private writing of the college classroom differs from the public writing of the internet, Michael Michaud discusses his efforts to bring student writing into the public sphere and generate discussion about the impact that writing can have.

Andrea Lunsford, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/andrea-lunsford/writing-to-make-something-happen-in-the-world/alunsford/

Andrea Lunsford discusses “good writing” in the context of words that serve a performative – even a transformative – purpose in the world, sharing and causing waves of social justice and change.

Engaging Students in the Reading

One of the great challenges for many of us is getting students to really engage with the readings. Students may read before class, but don’t annotate. Student may not read at all. And many students don’t necessarily think on their feet about the readings at hand. One of my challenges in the classroom is getting students to go back to the text itself, rather than simply talking in abstract terms about what happened in a story or a play.

As a member of my university’s faculty development committee, I’ve found myself in charge of a workshop on this very topic: getting students to engage with the reading. Given that’s it’s time for a new semester, I thought it might be useful to share a list of activities to use in the classroom to help foster thoughtful engagement with the text itself. Some of these are things I’ve written about before, some are ideas from other people that I’ve found helpful.

In-class discussion questions

Everyone approaches classroom discussion differently, and every class dynamic requires some different approaches to the way we present the questions to the students.

I’m a frequent user of small groups in my classrooms, and I’ve developed a number of ways to get the groups working on ideas. This particular exercise is one that encourages students to consider their own answers — but then to also evaluate the quality of other people’s answers.
This semester I tried something new with students who were reluctant to jump into full-class discussions. I projected 4-5 discussion questions (usually culled from the instructor’s manual to the textbook) and gave students the first 5-10 minutes of class to find information that would help answer those questions. I wish I could tell you where I ran across this idea, but it worked wonders with a class that was reluctant to join in discussions.
I’ve long used student-generated discussion questions in my upper division classes.
This guest post by Ben Bunting has some nice ideas about literature and contexts as discussion openers.

Writing as Discussion

Many of my courses are writing intensive courses, so I try to integrate written analysis of the literature into classroom participation.

I’ve found success with having students write analytical paragraphs as part of their approach to the texts, which can work in any classroom where analyzing information is central.
Barclay Barrios suggests having students write argument haikus about complex informational texts, which could certainly be translated into discussion-openers in a literature classroom. I will be doing this next semester, most assuredly. (Barrios has also suggested a way to do this with Vine.

In class reading

Actually having students read in the classroom can be useful, particularly early in the semester when they’re just figuring out how to do the work of the literature classroom.

Critical Reading , as exemplified here, is a technique I picked up from the Foundation for Critical Thinking. It can be useful when students are approaching a really challenging work. It helps students recognize the need to slow down as they read, and can build confidence in the idea that they can actually do the difficult reading.
I also like to have students make use of contexts sections in anthologies.
Having students view characters through the eyes of other characters in the text can be a useful way to understand character motivation.

Multi-modal approaches

Encouraging students to have fun with the literature, while still looking carefully into the text itself can be a useful way to engage students who are not English majors.

I recently had students create comics about Charles Dickens.
In teaching “The Things They Carried,” I’ve had students create categories of the items in the book — and I think this is something that could be adapted for a wide variety of stories and poems.
Barclay Barrios has written both about drawing the argument (which I’ve adapted as drawing the poem)

The aural nature of literature

And finally, literature — especially poetry — should be approached through the aural experience.

Joanne Diaz has students perform Shakespeare’s sonnets as slam poems, which encourages the students to consider the varying patterns of the poems.
Joanne Diaz also has her students use the Woodberry Poetry Room to teach students about active listening.

I think that all of these are adaptable for different levels and for different texts, which is generally how most of my teaching goes: I see what others are doing, and I adapt it to what works with my particular groups of students. I’m looking forward to another semester of teaching — and I certainly plan to adapt some of these activities in new ways for my classrooms.

Collaborative Documents and Student Centered Classrooms

I’ve been a slow adopter of using Google Drive, despite many years of having Google-supported email at the different universities where I’ve worked.

But in my late adoption of it, I’ve come to realize how useful it can be in the classroom, particularly when it comes to facilitating a lot of the work that I do to create a student-centered discussion.

I realized over the summer that I could use Google Drive for a couple of things. The first was to create journal templates for my students in my 100- and 200-level courses. In those courses, my students keep daily reading journals — and by having students write in a journal that I can see, I can immediately tell who is doing the work. More importantly, I can draw ideas into the classroom that students write about in their journals. It took some work to set everything up (I created a template, then made copies for all of the students), but it’s been a useful way to keep an eye on what interests the students in what they read.

My other major use of Google Drive is to create what are essentially collaborative documents of discussion questions. I did this initially because I’ve got an assignment that’s always been a bit clunky for me in terms of organization. In my 300- and 400-level courses, I’ve always taught students how to write open-ended discussion questions, and then I’ve had them submit questions daily (in lieu of a quiz). We use those questions in class to guide our conversation.

Previously, I’ve tried having the students just hand the questions to me in class (which really made me work on the fly) or email me either the night before or the hour before class. With the email, I wound up spend a lot of time collating the work, which also meant the potential for missing some of the questions in the overflowing email inbox. As I was preparing for my courses over the summer, I remembered an admonition from my student teaching days — if you can let the students do the work for you, have them do the work for you. Thus, for this, I’ve got the students in my upper division courses writing and collating their discussion questions in Google docs. Here, I simply created forms for each day of class — titled with the name of the text we’re reading and the assigned chapters of acts — and shared an entire folder with the class. Students submit questions until 30 minutes before class — then I print the entire thing off and use it as we work through the literature. I’ve found that students’ questions are less repetitive when they see what’s been asked before — and I’m even noticing that students will sometimes reference other students’ questions in their own (in which case, I know we have to discuss a certain topic).

I went into the semester thinking that this would be all we use shared documents for.

Then I decided that the students in my novels course really needed to take a careful look at the chronology of events in Dracula. I realized that this was not something we could really just do on the blackboard. We’ve been doing chapter-by-chapter breakdowns of plots at the beginning of class, but there are simply too many days and too many different narrators in Dracula for that to be effective.

So I created a shared document that simply lists all of the dates in Dracula when a character writes in a diary, sends a letter, or receives a message from a solicitor’s office. On the first day of class, I shared it with all of the students in the class, projected it from the overhead, and set students to the task of sorting things out. Students worked in groups of two or three, huddled (admittedly) around their phones, laptops, tablets, and the classroom computer, adding to the chronology together.

Once we spend the first chunk of class doing that, we take a look at the story in order — and it’s really helped the students find the details of Dracula’s movements (“Oh, wait! That’s what the dog on the ship was!” “Oh, that’s why there was the detail about the escaped wolf!”). I also color code the document, according to the different characters narrating (i.e. John Seward’s diary is in green, Mina Murray/Harker’s journal is in purple), which allows us to see how the narrative bounces from one character to another, and how the characters themselves have to piece information together over time.

In doing this we’ve been able to have an effective discussion of the structure of the novel, which has shown the students that they can, indeed, break down the narrative into its parts and look inside the inner workings of the novel.

Audio Theatre: A New Writing Platform

It had long been my contention that playwriting is more practical than screenwriting because it leads more directly to a finished product. In other words, whereas an ambitious playwright could organize his or her friends and stage a piece on a weekend, the screenwriter was dependent on the whims of Hollywood producers to obtain the resources to get their films made. This assessment of practicality, though, seems to apply less and less to today’s world in which there are so many opportunities through the internet. If a screenwriter uses the production and distribution means available through the web—for example, if a writer creates scripts for short Youtube films—then screenwriting can be every bit as practical as playwriting.

Besides screenwriting, the internet has enhanced the practicality of another field—radio drama. The format, which dwindled in the U.S. with the rise of television, is now reemerging under the aegis of podcasting and audiobooks. Teachers of dramatic writing are wise to embrace audio theatre for the following reasons:

It stands to become more and more important in our Internet Age.
It provides easy production opportunities for emerging writers—requiring no sets, costumes, or even line memorization, as required by film and the stage.
Digital recordings, the product of audio theatre endeavors, are easy to disseminate to a wide audience.

My university, Arkansas Tech, has been leading the way in audio theatre ventures for seven years now. Through an organization called the Arkansas Radio Theatre, we have created more than forty broadcasts which play on the local radio station, are made available to the visually impaired throughout the state, and are available on-line (click Public, then Radio Theatre). The Arkansas Radio Theatre is dedicated to new plays and adaptations of classic literature. An audio theatre company like the Arkansas Radio Theatre is easy to establish because free recording software is easily available. An interested instructor simply needs some microphones in order to record voices. Apart from that, an audio theatre company simply requires a means for broadcast—or some server space, which is readily available at most universities.

However, just because a production opportunity exists, that does not mean that student writers are prepared to take advantage of it. Because audio theatre is a unique form, writers must be trained with relevant coursework. In order to build the Radio Theatre into the curricular structures of my university, I am teaching (in Fall 2014) an upper-division topics course focusing on Radio Theatre Writing. Some of the assignments explore audio theatre as a genre: for example, listening to broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio and comparing them to the audio drama available today. Students will eventually work toward hour-long original scripts. Hopefully, the insights learned in teaching this class will help others who attempt to engage in audio theatre projects. I will report on the progress of the course in later posts.

Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 2

Last week on this blog Kelli Marshall explained how Twitter can be used as a discussion tool in the literature classroom. Building on that, I want to look at the nitty-gritty of what to consider if you decide to experiment with Twitter in your course.

There are three main things you and your students need to know to have a good conversation on Twitter.

How to tweet.
How to @reply or @mention people.
How to use #hashtags.

Tweeting is pretty simple and is similar to SMS texting—though you may want to show students how to shorten links (through services like bitly.com) and provide them with rules for decorum. @Replying or @mentioning people is also really easy: you can either hit the reply button below a person’s tweet, or, in your own tweet, type in that person’s Twitter handle preceded by the @ symbol. Either way, that person will be notified of your reply and can then tweet back to you, a system that encourages conversation.

Using #hashtags is also simple but requires some initial setup. A #hashtag is something that you include in a tweet in order to categorize it. #Hashtags are commonly used in tweets that mention trending world or local events; they are also created for conferences and gatherings. Basically, #hashtags bring together tweets that are related by topic area. The easiest way to set up a discussion for your class is to create a course-specific #hashtag and have your students include it in any of their course-related posts. Then you can all search for the #hashtag on Twitter (or by using a service like hashtags.org) and find an up-to-date listing of all tweets that include it. Continue reading “Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 2”

Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 1

Twitter lends itself to discussion. It’s quick, easy, and—with its strict structure and economy of space—forces writers to condense their thoughts while maintaining coherence. Unlike other social networking sites, Twitter does not require you to follow (or “friend”) others in order to see their posts; Twitter allows you to read the conversations of anyone you’d like, mitigating some (though, not all) of the privacy issues that might lead us away from using social media sites in the classroom. There has been a considerable amount of discussion on various sites and academic blogs about using Twitter in academic settings (see the Profhacker blog: here, here, or most recently, here), Bill Wolff’s blog, the site, Emerging EdTech or here at Bedford Bits and Lit Bits. Some bloggers have discussed how to use Twitter for research and engagement among academics, while others have examined how and why to use Twitter as a classroom tool. Over at Kelli Marshall’s blog is a candid and detailed post on using Twitter as a discussion tool in some of the film courses Marshall has taught. She explains that while some students have resisted using the site, they have generally produced great comments about the course’s content and have participated in thoughtful conversations, even beyond the classroom. As Marshall also teaches literature courses, I asked her a few questions about her experience using Twitter and how it might be applied to a literature classroom.

Hetland: How might Twitter benefit our classroom / students / student discussion?

Marshall: Giving shyer students a voice. Continuing in-class discussion outside the classroom. Forcing students to get to the “meat” of their argument/opinion (i.e., the 140 character limit). Encouraging students to interact with others online, i.e., classmates, me (!), students in other parts of the US/world, celebrities, film directors, etc.

Hetland: How could Twitter be used in a literature classroom?

Continue reading “Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 1”

Twitter @TeachingPoetry

A few weeks ago, Teaching Poetry entered the world of Twitter. Yes, it’s true. You can follow us @teachingpoetry.

In case you think Twitter is a passing trend, consider this: Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less, the work of two University of Chicago undergraduates, was published by Penguin in December 2009. It delivers works by Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, and Joyce in a series of bite size morsels. Poets & Writers magazine online writes about it.

Similarly, in 2009 Soft Skull Press bought a 480,000 character novel written entirely on Twitter.

Since we anticipate Twitter sticking around for a while, we thought we’d figure out the nature of the 140-character micromessage. We’ve had our first taste of what poets, publishers, and bookstores are doing in Twitterland. Here’s a sample:

Some people are composing poems, tweet by tweet, like Scott Reid @apwpoet. Others use Twitter to advertise the day’s poems posted to their blogs, such as Yiching Lin @yichinglin.

The haiku—or twaiku—is popular on Twitter, naturally, since its small form doesn’t overrun Twitter’s character boundaries. There’s even a trend called haiku-throw-down in which fast-typing tweeters riff on each other’s tweets, creating new three-line poems every minute or less.

The Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival is on Twitter, preparing for National Poetry Month in April.

Poets & Writers, “the primary source of information, support, and guidance for creative writers” is here, as well as the outstanding resource Poets.org, from the Academy of American poets. Poets House gives updated on events at their library, literary center, and hot-seat of poetic inspiration.

You can find news from publishers large and small such as Red Hen Press, organizations such as Poetry Speaks, and bookstores such as Powell’s and McNally Jackson (or McNally Robinson, if you’re in Canada).

All in all, Twitter threatens to unite poets, poetry-lovers, buyers, sellers, and performers of poetry. For those used to poetic solitude, this connectivity might just break all taboos and conventions. Can we stand it?!

Tell Us

Who are your favorite poets on Twitter? How do you use Twitter in your classroom? How do students use it? How do you think social media can be useful in poetry classroom activities? Send us your thoughts.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni

Ram Devineni is the founder and editor of Rattapallax magazine, a literary journal dedicated to publishing poetry from around the world. Devineni, also a filmmaker, co-founded the film school Academia Internacional de Cinema in São Paulo and recently co-produced Amir Naderi’s Vegas: Based on a True Story, which premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and showed in competition in the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. For the 2009 PEN World Voices Literary Festival, Devineni curated a panel on literary short films and documentaries.

The Teaching Poetry blog asked Ram a few questions about his work with poetry and film.

Teaching Poetry: Tell us about your documentary on Ginsberg.

Ram Devineni: Ginsberg’s Karma is a thirty-minute documentary about the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It follows his mythical journey to India in the early 1960s that transformed his perspective on life and his work. Poet Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, traces the two years Ginsberg spent in India by visiting the places where he stayed and talking with the people he met and influenced, as well as intimate interviews with Beat poets and friends. Bob and I make appearances in it, too. Continue reading “Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni”

Can Film Serve Poetry?

In this week’s edition of New York Magazine, actor James Franco (Milk, Spider Man) shows that he knows a thing or two about poetry. Even more interesting is that as a student he made films inspired by the poetry of Anthony Hecht and Frank Bidart.

New York Magazine writes, “At a Gucci-hosted cocktail party for an art film called Erased James Franco, Franco said he discovered Bidart while studying poetry at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. ‘This teacher brought it into class, and everybody was kinda shocked. It’s very dark and it’s about this guy. He’s a murderer, a necrophiliac, and it’s in a poem, right?’ said Franco. ‘What struck me is that it’s a kind of a confessional poem, or a dramatic monologue. It’s as if the poet is using this crazy man as a mask to express certain feelings and go to an extreme place where those feelings could be felt.’ ”

Franco, who has literary aspirations, will star as Allen Ginsberg in the soon-to-be-released movie, Howl, named after Ginsberg’s break-out poem.

Still the question remains, can a film inspired by a poem effectively serve that poem? After all, the visuals in the readers’ mind are very personal. Can a film do justice to that experience? Here’s a YouTube movie of Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues.” Decide for yourself by watching the movie below, and answering the questions that follow. Continue reading “Can Film Serve Poetry?”