Well, Bri helped me get back up on the blog thank goodness! Anyway, I wanted to discuss the idea of what assignments would help students to deal with my reading assignments for EN1000. Right now I only have a hazy idea (it's been a sick week for me), but I think what may help them is to assign them 2 questions to answer when finished reading each assignment. I will ask them to first identify a passage that caused them the most trouble and why. Then I will ask them to write what they believed was the most important information from the reading and why. With reading their responses, hopefully I can then get a sense of what kind of reading causes them the most trouble so that I can share some strategies with them. I also like the idea in Bean about showing students my own marked copy of a text and explaining my reading process to them.
One other idea I have is using the discussion board on blackboard so they can have a running conversation among themselves which will hopefully answer a lot of their questions as well as show them all some various viewpoints on the reading.
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3 comments:
Rebecca,
I hope to use Blackboard in my course as well. I'm just hoping I can find a way to incorporate outside-of-class discussion assignments so it doesn't seem (to them) an exercise in futility (i.e. "This is dumb and not graded, so I won't do it.").
I'm also wanting to use blackboard, but I have doubts about whether students will use it if they're not required to, remembering similar situations in which I haven't gone the extra mile to do merely "suggested" work. Are you planning on making this required for your course, Rebecca?
As I use blackboard, I plan to have specific questions for students to respond to and debate. How much do you think specific questions help students focus their attention when they read? How much does this method limit them?
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