Writing Across the Curriculum

Some interesting ways to engage students in the content through twitter.

In some ways, the flipped model is an improvement. Research shows that tailored tutoring is more effective than lectures for understanding, mastery, and retention. But the flipped classroom doesn't come close to preparing students for the challenges of today's world and workforce. As progressive educational activist Alfie Kohn notes, great teaching isn't just about content but motivation and empowerment: Real learning gives you the mental habits, practice, and confidence to know that, in a crisis, you can count on yourself to learn something new. That's crucial in a world where, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, adults change careers (not just jobs) four to six times or where, as an Australian study predicts, 65% of today's teens will end up in careers that haven't even been invented yet. We don't need to flip the classroom. We need to make it do cartwheels.

I find this paragraph particularly telling: "The cartwheeled classroom not only connects text books and classrooms to the real world, but it also inspires, uplifts, and offers the joy of accomplishment. Transformative, connected knowledge isn't a thing--it's an action, an accomplishment, a connection that spins your world upside down, then sets you squarely on your feet, eager to whirl again. It's a paradigm shift." Imagine what this could mean for our ASU QEP, for example, if we told our twelve 2012-2013 teachers that each of their QEP courses was going to be taught within the larger context of being meaningful to the population of a Haitian, African, Muslim, or Afghan village or community. The difference for the students in their real-world learning would be immeasurable.

Download hundreds of free audio books, mostly classics, to your MP3 player or computer. Below, you'll find great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Keith, this is amazing, astounding, and literally science-fiction come to life for us oldsters -- throws the concept of "home schooling" into an entirely new light, not to mention expanding the conventional classroom. In just poking around a little at the site, I also found "gutenberg.org" and "librivox.org" mentioned as sources of more and more treasures. Thanks for this gift!

This guy has some very interesting thoughts, but can teachers really afford to follow some of his advice??  

His sense of audience is ridiculous. I'm all about creativity, even in academic writing. My students have a variety of creative opportunities, but the fact remains that they need to learn how to put thoughts together effectively. I just looked at two essays that had absolutely no coherent point, even though they featured personal experiences. He made a comparison between essays and novels. Dude! They are two completely different forms of writing. They have different goals and different parameters. Yes, the 5-paragraph essay is a stilted, inauthentic form of writing and it is largely on its way out, but at the secondary level, it is the training wheels some students need to learn how to organize their thoughts coherently. No matter how they write, they still have to say SOMETHING.

He does exaggerate for effect, e.g. his claim that students are told to write in a style similar to classic literature--ridiculous! No one is told to copy any writing style previous to 1950, unless it is graduate students being told to mimic the horrible jargon of academic journals, but I think that's a different "bad" than what he means here. He avoids what should be his real topic--truly bad writing; I mean incompetent, to the point of being an effort to follow, poorly structured writing. We see this writing from the strongest cases of ESL students and from students who seem to have skipped several grades in school or who have never read a great deal in their school years. He leaves off the most important tool for teaching writing, and that is frequency. Anyone who only writes by email, Facebook, and twitter, and only writes something for a class once or twice a semester, will never break into a "conversational" form of writing (with complete sentences and paragraphs) that will be recognized as literate, normal, and natural. We recommend starting with short, non-graded writing and, by writing 2-3 times a week, working up to something more substantial. If teachers can do that, then college student writing will improve, but the plan requires patience and consistency from the teacher.

the history department at Middlebury College voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work.

I don't think that banning Wikipedia is going to solve the problem of students using sources without checking their reliability, which is the actual problem at hand here. I think Wikipedia is a great place to start, but that's where its usefulness ends. I propose using students' fondness of Wikipedia as a place to start teaching the principles of triangulation, as mentioned in the article.

This article is about 5 steps you can take, as a writing teacher, to digitize your writing workshop. There are many more, though, so "stay tuned" for future articles!

This article gives some good examples of different types of in class writing our QEP instructors can use for graded or non graded writing assignments.

Three weeks ago I added another layer to our digital writing workshop:  I introduced students to Google Docs, and with it learned the power and potential of yet another space that again is changing writing instruction as I know it.

If you are beginning to investigate what a Flipped Classroom is, with the thought of possibly trying some kind of Flip yourself… then this is also the right place. I have researched and tried to find you the very best resources to get educators in all positions thinking about what a Flipped Classroom" really is"? I know that if you take a look at the resources provided you will walk away with a better understanding, and a well thought out implementation.

"Bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own technology (BYOT) policies are growing in education and the workplace. Teachers are taking advantage of mobile devices for "m-learning,""

These techniques can provide lots of access points to information.

a social network all about the flipped classroom.

Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.

This is from March of 2011??? Keith, did you post it because it resonates with what you're seeing in Florida now? I don't think this rudeness describes Albany State U, just the obvious unpreparedness of the students. Our writing lab specialists do encounter demanding students sometimes, but I think it's fairly rare, and I haven't heard of extended bad feelings.

It is a "best practice" for classroom teachers today to use a website as a learning portal for links and resources related to class studies. In this learning module we'll learn the difference between blogs and wikis, explore examples of K-12 exemplary classroom wikis and professional portfolios, as well as tools for creating educational wikis.

on-line exchanges between researchers and research subjects, exchanges modeled on the back-and-forth interactions between bloggers and blog readers, might be the beginning of the end for traditional forms of ethnographic writing, differently configuring those conventional relationships in radically new ways.

I like this one a lot. Could be another workshop for us and/or for our faculty group. Not to overlook the fact, these activities also count as professional development, just like attending a conference, and actually with more personal benefit.

Clearly, the platforms and devices becoming available are more flexible, more powerful, more portable, and more user-friendly. 24x7 access to content makes mLearning more convenient and valuable. New communication channels open up new opportunities to connect with coworkers and experts, anytime and anywhere. And the use of cloud computing makes virtually limitless amounts of content instantly available to virtually limitless numbers of users.

KEITH, THEY ARE SINGING YOUR/OUR SONG !