A post from the College Ready Writing blog

I thought you might enjoy this blog posting from Inside Higher Ed about active learning in a composition course that meets in the computer lab.

Yet another platform to consider

Guest blogger Trent M. Kays has a very interesting post on Prof Hacker about using Posterous and Tinychat as a replacement for a traditional CMS. Posterous, he says, he is similar to blogger but more conveniently allows privacy control. It also allows for forum-type discussions (with sign-in required), though I'm not sure if this is similar to Angel's discussion forums. I'm going to check it out, I think.

I have been using a course mother-blog with sidebar links to individual student blogs for a number of semesters and have been pretty satisfied with that "mode." The privacy issue, though, was one factor that sent me to MyCompLab this semester. (I had offered to have students set up password-protected blogs in blogger; only one student took me up on it, but I found it quite a clunky solution.) The possibility of incorporating discussion forums with a blog attracts me, particularly for 102, though I'm not sure how well these discussion forums match the functionality of Angel's. And then there's the advantage of MCL's built-in writing, grammar, research support.

It makes me dizzy how many factors go into the decision! (Here's a post I did last fall that tries to sum it up.)

It seems that we are using a variety of platforms for exchanging drafts and feedback: blogs, Angel, MCL, email. I'd be interested to see how they compare, both from our perspective and students'. Any ideas how we might go about getting some info together?

Using google docs for survey

Because I thought it was neat when I saw it in Title III workshop, I tried a quick survey the first day of class to poll students about their attitudes and experiences towards technology. You can use google docs to create a form, which gives question(s) plus boxes for answers. After saving, you can get an embed code to put the survey on a website. Then you can get a link to results to see live-time postings. I set up a quick blog because students hand't had a chance to register for MyCompLab. Here's a link to the survey and survey results are posted here.

Well, this is a little rough, but I did a short video tutorial on how to create these surveys: click here to see it.

I've been thinking a bit about how I might use this in the lab, as I say on the video to solicit open-ended, anonymous responses that might be useful in a full-class workshop session. Any other ideas what you might do?

There are some formatting issues. I played around a little with the look of that spreadsheet--not crazy about the narrow columns and I'd like to be able to get rid of those empty columns to the right.

How so I post a doc to the blog?

Hi Folks!

I enjoyed our first meeting. I'd like to post the Editing Mini-Lesson Assignment and Sample Mini-Lesson. If you have any advice for how to improve this assignment, I'd appreciate it. If you like it and want to use it and/or tweak it for your purposes, please be my guest.

The problem is I don't know how to post it here as an attachment. Please advise.

Oy...am I really ready for this?

First thoughts...

I thought we might want to use this space as a place to collect up some links, resources, ideas, questions, etc. so I started with a few categories on the right: books that we could share (I used my initials after title for books I own and linked to amazon page); related blogs; online resources. Once you accept invitation to blog, I'll change your status to administrators so you can add stuff on sidebar as well.

Here are my initial ideas about what it might be possible to do with 101 students in a computer lab:

• work on invention strategies (mind-mapping software, etc.)
• incorporation of more multimedia content (podcasts, TED talks, LoC content, etc.)
• collaborative writing projects (via wiki or, for me this fall, mycomplab)
• online peer review
• all sorts of research stuff (finding and evaluating sources, annotating web pages, RefWorks maybe, or some robust source collecting/annotating program)