Great Ways to Incorporate Technology

High Tech Teacher

Excellent use of technology can enhance your teaching and accelerate student learning.
(Or not -- don't think about those days when either you or a student spent forty-five minutes trying to run a power-point with a laptop and projector, and it never did work.)

Teaching:
  • Using your website to make your syllabus, your calendar, and your assignments available digitally
  • The usual suspects: films, lyrics from CD's, a computerized slide show or even, once in a while, a truly excellent power point.

For composition teachers:

  1. Online demonstrations of legitimate websites vs. less dependable websites
  2. Online demonstrations of how to use web information, graphics, videos, blogs, email, etc. and how to cite those sources
  3. Use of computer and projector to show steps in the writing process:
    • brainstorming
    • freewriting
    • writing and editing a thesis
    • developing a body paragraph
    • graceful use of sources
    • documenting source material
    • doing proper indented quotations
    • writing topic sentences that connect to the thesis
Assignments:
  1. Blogs, websites, podcasts and films as possible 21st century types of writing.
    Assign a blog (see one for 1A)
  2. Incorporation of graphics, audio and video (YouTube, etc.) material into "papers" as supporting data.
  3. Technology issues as topics for analysis, argument, and persuasion. 
  4. Turnitin and Google as tools for teachers and students to avoid plagiarism.
  5. Comment and other digital paper-response programs as alternatives to handwritten comments on hard copy.
  6. In-class papers written in the computer lab. 
  7. Research days in the computer lab.
Communication:
  1. Messages to students before the first day using the Portal
  2. Class listservs and discussion boards linked to your website for extending discussion past the class period.
  3. Individual e-mails to students about whom we are concerned
  4. Class e-mails about emergency absences, clarification of assignments or for reminders.

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