This site, which appears on OER Commons and originated with the National Council of Teachers of English/ReadWriteThink site, is a series of lessons aimed at high school lessons which use The Cat in the Hat to learn and practice psychoanalytical literary criticism. This will be one of the major elements of Module 4 in my "Politics of Dr. Seuss" course. I will be drawing from several portions of this activity, which reviews theme, plot, indirect characterization, and then applies Freudian concepts of id, ego and superego to analyze various characters in The Cat in the Hat.

In Module 3 of my class on "The Politics of Dr. Seuss," we will be exploring the political cartoons that Dr. Seuss and others produced during World War 2. These cartoons mostly appeared in PM, a New York newspaper, from 1941 to 1943. I discovered these cartoons in a book called Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War, and I had planned to scan and upload cartoons from the book. But I searched in MERLOT and was so pleased to find a treasure trove of hundreds of cartoons! I can draw on these for my Powerpoint presentation to the class and direct students to this website to find even more.

This blog entry is mostly an advertisement, but also a description of the ebook you see in the title. Author Michelle Pacansky-Brock offers multiple options for using Voicethread in the online classroom, backed by research and her own experience. As an ebook, readers are given the opportunity to see actual Voicethreads that she has used and are given step-by-step guidance on how to build their own.

A blog entry about what they don't tell you in "teacher school" -- namely, that there is not enough time, not enough resources, not enough YOU -- to do everything that you know know needs to be done. Peter Greene's blog is called CURMUDGUCATION.

This article discusses the benefits of peer review in writing instruction, outlines common variants of student resistance to the peer review process, and suggests strategies to make peer review more successful as a learning activity.

This article from Dartmouth College is a good introduction to the basic steps of the writing process, and jumps off to several links which get into the steps in more detail. The authors stress that each student's process is going to be a little different; writing a paper is not like following a recipe with precise steps.

This article tackles the subject of student motivation - specifically, how students can be intrinsically motivated rather than just going for the grade. Several possible options are discussed for how to build up motivation over time. The article mostly focuses on younger children, but perhaps some of the strategies can be adapted for college students?

This article describes a study done in a graduate education course, where students were asked to facilitate discussions. It highlights specific discussion types and walks through the problems students experienced adjusting to this new role. (Even though they were teachers themselves, these graduate students weren't accustomed to functioning in the teacher role during an online class!)

I found this article in the UAlbany library - if the link doesn't work, do a search for "In Defense of the Sage on the Stage" by Marianne Jennings. It's a fascinating article, a long read, but passionate in its insistence that we have gone too far in our efforts to make everything student-centered. Jennings makes the argument that there IS still room for the "brilliant lecturer."

"In Defense of the Sage on the Stage" - Marianne Jennings ... a fascinating argument!

This article from 2008 talks about time management problems among college faculty and suggests ways to combat them.

I just finished writing a blog entry about time management and found this article to be helpful...

This article by Matthew Putz discusses ideas for course structuring that will help students better navigate the course. Sound theories at work here!

This article by Matthew Putz discusses ideas for course structuring that will help students better navigate the course. Sound theories at work here!

This is a tool I found to design your own personality quiz, like the Buzzfeed quizzes we see on Facebook. I'd like to try this out!

This personality quiz tool is one I'd like to try using as an icebreaker in my "The World of Dr. Seuss" course.

I am trying to find research (if it exists) on the academic value of online personality quizzes. This article, which appeared in several Canadian newspapers, discusses what is so compelling about this social media trend.

I am curious, can you folks read this article? I am posting the link as it appeared in the SUNY Albany library, and since we are SUNY Albany students, it should work, right? A couple of folks said so on the discussion board ...

I suspect that to actually use this "make your own personality quiz" application, there will be money involved, but I thought it was worth checking out anyway...

After listening to Prof. Pickett's presentation and thinking about effective icebreakers, I thought I'd really like to learn how to make a Buzzfeed-style personality quiz. This website might do the trick.

I am interested in finding information about writing centers, in particular online writing centers, because that will likely be my area of focus if I end up doing a doctorate program. This particular website is a great compilation of research. It's not a peer-reviewed journal, but it does reference lots of articles to look up later. One of the topics I was most interested in here is students' attitudes and practices regarding research and citation of said research.

This link will take you to the opening chapter of Tom Romano's latest book about multi-genre papers. Romano has been working on this concept for close to two decades. It branches off Gardner's work on multiple intelligences, which Samantha wrote about on the Module 1 discussion board. I believe that we need to rethink what an academic paper "should" look like. Are we teaching an outdated model?

Thanks for the comment. I haven't done much with multigenre papers since getting the teacher certification, but I do think it's an area that needs more exploring. Romano focuses mostly on the high school population but I see no reason why these ideas can't be pulled up into an expository writing course. Yes, college students need to know how to do the basic research, citation, and so on, but they also need to know how to CREATE, how to enjoy words for words' sake rather than putting words on the page to fulfill a grading formula. Again, call me a Luddite if you will but I fear that as these web tools grow more sophisticated, we are losing our grip on the simple pleasure of the written word...

The videos for Module 1, quite honestly, were mind-blowing. And what I was left with, after watching them all, was this thought -- can the human mind truly process even a dollop of all of the information that is out there? In our quest to gain access to as much information as possible, are we losing our ability to dig deep within it? This video came across my Facebook not too long ago, and it really made me wonder how much is too much...