I have adopted, adapted, and discovered many effective and interesting ways to integrate technology into my teaching. I discuss some of these ways below. If you are interested in my personal reflections on these and other applications of technology for education, see the “Teaching Philosophy” Tab.
Course Web Spaces and Online Communication
I use a variety of online resources and tools to communicate with students and manage my courses. Penn State’s course management system ANGEL is particularly prominent in my teaching. I build and maintain ANGEL pages for each course that I teach. Below is an ANGEL screen capture from a recent section of ENGL 202C: Technical writing. I create a folder for each of the course’s six units, and I place relevant materials in each one. This particular image from the Unit 6 folder shows documents that I posted (including the assignment sheet, individual lessons pertaining to the project, etc.), a discussion forum, and an ANGEL dropbox. I always have my 202C students submit their drafts electronically.
In addition to communicating through ANGEL, I frequently contact students individually or as a group through email. Below is a screen capture of an email I sent to students in my recent summer study abroad class. I believe that the email reflects the rapport that I foster with my students and the genial, casual teaching style that I try to maintain.
For that same summer course, I created a Facebook group that included me and all of the students. The Facebook page for the group was a great, fun resource for the students to make travel arrangements, share cell phone numbers, and manage other matters before the trip began. Furthermore, it provided a lively online space for interactions outside the classroom while we were in London.
Exploring the Past with Present Technologies
In my Renaissance literature courses, I like to make the past (some of my students would probably say “ancient”) authors and texts come alive for my twenty-first century students, and various online resources make it easier than ever to do this.
This screen capture from EEBO shows the prefatory poem and title page of Shakespeare’s First Folio, printed posthumously in 1623.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) is an incredible resource for giving students access to images of actual early modern printed books. This database, available for free through the Penn State library webpage, allows a teacher, scholar, or student to search for Renaissance publications by author, title, date, or even (in many cases) key words in the texts themselves. In addition to using our twenty-first century editions of Shakespeare’s works, we can look at images of Shakespeare’s First Folio or earlier individual plays in quarto format. When discussing The Tempest, I can show them early modern travel narratives like Hakluyt’s immensely influential Principal Navigations. Through EEBO, the students get an immediate access to a tremendous amount of early modern printed culture. Nothing can quite compare with actually holding an early printed text in your hands, but this can be remedied by taking one class period to go to a presentation in the Rare Books Room at Paterno Library. This way, the students can have a day to experience the material text of an early printed book, but we can make use of Renaissance books online at any time.
A screen capture from an EEBO image of *The Principal Navigations* by Hakluyt.
Looking at early modern books leads naturally into a discussion of how these books were printed. To be honest, I have been repeatedly surprised at how interested students are in Renaissance printing practices, but many of them are genuinely curious about the subject. I like to begin our discussion with a brief video that demonstrates the Gutenberg printing press functioned, and Youtube has lots of examples to choose from. With this context, I explain how the large sheets of paper used in the Gutenberg press had to be folded and cut in particular ways, and this effected what pages of the eventual book could be printed on what part of the paper. Using their own sheets of white paper and scissors, I have the students experiment to try to figure out what way the pages should be organized in order to make a coherent text. This video from the Folger Shakespeare library shows how the exercise is meant to go.
Of course, when studying dramatic texts, the context of Renaissance playhouses is at least as important as this history of printing. There are several videos about the Globe Theatre available on Youtube. In a technology classroom, I can use a portion of classtime to show my favorite video in part or full, but I can also assign the video as homework if that is more convenient.
Now that I have taught in London, I have a lot of photographs of London locations that I took myself. I find that students connect with lessons and details that their teachers themselves are excited about, and it will easy for me to get excited when (briefly) recounting these experiences with my students. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you can view thumbnails for images of the Globe Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Westminster Abbey. (Note: The alignment of images is affected by your current web browser and zoom settings.)
Online Resource Assignments
In addition to using online resources like EEBO or Youtube in my lessons, I design assignments that force my students to become fluent in particular resources.
In my technical writing courses, I use the second unit to have my students identify relevant job postings and simulate the application process by crafting cover letters and resumes that have been tailored to the specific rhetorical situation. After introducing the project with their assignment sheet, I have the students visit an online job board of their choosing, whether it’s Monster, Career Builder, or something else. The students are then expected to spend fifteen to twenty minutes experimenting with the site, figuring out its strengths, weakness, and idiosyncrasies. Each student then submits a brief write-up explaining their findings, and I make these write-ups available to all students so they can quickly gather information about the different job search resources.
Later in the same course, I assign a group project designed to help the students identify and explain a series of online resources relevant to students and professionals in their field. I adapted this assignment from an “Internet Resource Guide” project in the standard version of 202C. While the original assignment was effective, a single student was responsible for the entire lengthy and elaborate guide. By adding a collaborative dimension to the project, the guide-writing process becomes a more manageable one, while also allowing us all to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of collaborative work. For lessons in this unit, I familiarize my students with online resources like Google Drive and Dropbox, and I make sure they have plenty of opportunities to discuss their experiences communicating and collaborating online. I explain the requirements for the assignment on my assignment sheet.
Power Point Presentation
Not all of my uses of technology require the internet, of course. PowerPoint presentations offer a useful visual aid to help students identify and retain important information, and they can also be an effective means to supplement or spark class discussions. I designed this particular PowerPoint for the lecture I presented in ENGL 221, the British literature survey course. As you can see, the presentation provides some necessary biographical and historical context on Edmund Spenser, and then it draws the student’s attention to specific quotations, some of which had not been provided in their reading assignment prior to the lecture. Rather than just lecturing on the relevant passages, however, I also asked the students questions, allowing for a more dynamic learning experience.
