Autumn Quarter Planning Your Course & Teaching with Technology Notes
- If you have any current assignments and projects that you’ve used in the past in conventional print or word-processing formats that you’d like to convert to a digital or an online format, we can do that — or if you have something more complicated and complex in mind, we can do that, too
- How to use computer classrooms and laptop classrooms productively: activities, file management, and writing-studio method approaches — we can even meet in the classroom where you’ll be teaching and test-drive some activities, for example
- Using DePaul Library databases for teaching & learning materials — linking, downloading, sharing — to use in your courses
- Planning for your Digication assignments: introducing digital portfolios, assigning them, reading them, and assessing them
- Looking at process and product contexts for multimodal composing, including visual rhetoric, remix, composing with audio, and resources for art and images that keep you and students in a safe harbor, copyright-wise
- Using digital tools for collaborative writing, editing, and peer review
- For those of you interested in the relationship between literacy practices and any of those possibilities, we can also read some recent scholarship that helps to put them into literacy, composition, and rhetorical contexts; this helps to balance the why and the how of teaching with technology
- And anything else you want to work on!
If you’d like to meet before classes start, don’t hesitate to email Michael.
D-WRD 2013-14 Notes
We’re canceling the D-WRD Working Group for the Autumn Quarter to make room for the Portfolio Pedagogy Task Force, and we’ll pick up in the Winter Quarter and Spring Quarters. We can make good use of this pause by scheduling one-on-one sessions if you want to learn any new software, work on any of the possibilities from the above list, or read some scholarship together.
Some planned sessions for the Winter Quarter and Spring Quarters:
- A session on teaching online courses, for which we have some great local and disciplinary materials, methods, and expertise available
- A session on using tags in Digication and the metadata structure behind them
- A session dedicated to another Student Writing Portfolio Roundtable
- A session on the relationship between multimodality and our x-sections, so that we can explore the relationships between multimodality and multilingual contexts
- A session dedicated to strategies for responding to and commenting on student work — drawing especially from Teaching with Lunsford Handbooks and The St. Martin’s Handbook Instructor’s Notes — in the new comment feature in Digication
- A session dedicated to composing and workshopping our Teaching Portfolios
There’s plenty of room for additional workshops, sessions, and discussions; if you’d like to add one, just email Michael.
That’s how the D-WRD Working Group works, just as a reminder: we learn, practice and explore what you want to learn, practice, and explore. D-WRD is primarily designed for the professional development of part-time and full-time colleagues who may not be on campus regularly enough to take advantage of the many workshops, events, and other forms of support that DePaul offers to its faculty. We focus on practical, pedagogical work and collective expertise in an environment of mutual support that you can use in your classroom; we read widely and situate teaching-with-technology scholarship in local contexts; and we help you develop your own Teaching Portfolios where you can reflect on and showcase your teaching & learning expertise. We’re also pretty informal: you can come and go as needed.
You need not be technology giddy to participate in D-WRD. We’ve had plenty of folks who are firmly embedded in print literacies and those who are highly skeptical of all things digital. We’re a big tent, and the wider range of perspectives we have, the more likely we are to adjudicate productively some of the claims about teaching with technology.
Another way to connect with the D-WRD Working group is to subscribe to our low-traffic email list, where we share professional-development resources, problem-solve tech issues, and brainstorm teaching ideas.