Back to School Edition - Teaching with Technology

This semester, for the first time in four semesters, I do not have an online course. Instead, all of my courses are face-to-face: first-year composition, technical writing, and an introduction to English studies for majors and minors.

Where earlier posts considered what it was like to teach and learn online, this semester's (hopefully more regular) posts will consider bringing technology into the classroom. Deciding whether or not to use technology, exploring the different ways that students choose to (or not to) use technology in their assignments and during the class period, and considering the learning effects of technology.

This semester, I'm considering using various uses of technology, and they're not all electronic.

• Graphic novels to teach visual rhetoric and document design
• Multi-modal assignments (including web pages, video and sound recordings, and paper and ink) 
• Cell phones (yes, cell phones!) in class 
• And, the good, old, computer classroom (two of my three courses are in a lab setting) 

Each week, I'll blog about the ways in which my students used technology in the classroom, how it's working (or not working) and what I'd like to see happen from their new found skills.

My good friend Danny at The Arnoldian Project has written about his own experiments using Twitter in the composition classroom. I look forward to more insights into how that experiment goes for him this year. Maybe I'll do the same (though, that would require me to use Twitter, too.)