Well, another academic year has gone by, and now is the time I like to reflect back on what I did in the classroom that worked and what what didn't. Every semester I experiment with my methods, trying to find more efficient and effective ways to teach writing with technology. I thought I might share a few things and then invite everyone else to reflect a bit on their own teaching with technology stories.

What I intend to work on next year is bringing in more free and open software into my teaching. I've been a bit slow to switch because of the intense workloads I'm given as a compositionist. I have an efficient grading and reviewing routine worked out with Blackboard and Word, and I'm not eager to abandon these strategies to try something new. Still, I will try my best to leave Word behind and learn to love Open Office. ;-)

One of the biggest challenges I faced this year was learning how to teach an online course. I feel I have a lot to learn about teaching online. Most of my online students dropped early on, and only a few will pass (the rest stopped submitting assignments). I blame part of this on the unpreparedness of some of the students; I think that many selected the online course because they felt it would be easy or, more likely, knew they were underprepared and didn't want the pressure of a face-to-face class. I also felt like these students were missing out by not attending my lectures. I'm a good lecturer and presenter, and there seems to be something about my personality that makes students eager to do their best. I get to know students early on, greet them by name, and make lots of eye contact with them and try to get to know them. What can I say; most students like me a lot and I use this to my advantage in getting them to write better. In the online course, the only time I heard from them was when one complained or had a serious problem. Not seeing the "positive" really brought me down; it seemed as though the online course was more of a "problem" than it really was. It's just that I didn't hear much about what was going right because those folks didn't feel pressured to email or try to contact me. It's hard to get my personality across in a strictly online situation, and I don't think I was very successful at it (even folks I meet at conferences who know me from Knews often remark that I'm much different IRL than online). To address the situation, I've purchased a voice recorder and intend (if I ever teach another online course!) to make my audio lectures available for download. At least this way students will have some chance to get the "physical" presence.

Of course, it's always painful to read negative student reviews. I was lucky this semester to have an overwhelmingly positive evaluations, but a few really hurt my feelings. I had students reflect on their experiences in my course and was really shocked at a few from a few of my best students. I must be nuts. I have all of this praise from the majority, but the few that really "cut me a new one" are the ones that dominate my consciousness. I feel as though I worked my butt off just to be dismissed in the end by a couple ungrateful students. Do you ever feel that way about evaluations? I suppose that one reason I'm in this gig in the first place is that I feel like I'm making a difference to these students. Reading about how they thought the course was useless really brings me down.

One thing I'd love to do next semester involves the portfolios. At the end of the course, I had students revise all their previous papers and put them together in an e-portfolio. Unfortunately, I didn't require that they TRACK CHANGES, so now I either have to take their word that they made the changes they describe in their letters of transmittal or go back with merge/compare documents and see for myself. That's tedious, and I don't have time to do it. However, a few interesting possibilities have revealed themselves.

I noticed that when I submitted a portfolio to turnitin.com, the system thought students had plagiarized their own papers. This sounds like a bug, but it's really helpful. For instance, the system might say a document is 90% plagiarized, but then you see that the source is a previous version of the student's document you submitted earlier. This means that 10% of the document has been revised, and you can see in great detail what was added, rearranged, and so on.

In other words, if I had submitted all student papers to turnitin, I would now have a very easy time of seeing how much they had changed in their portfolios. It's something worth thinking about for next semester (though I'm not sure St. Cloud has this system in place).

Of course the other option would be for students to copy/paste all their previous editions into a new document, SAVE IT, and then turn on track changes (they could make them invisible by selecting VIEW FINAL VERSION) and then I'd still have an easy way of comparing the differences.

OR, I could have them just turn all their work into a wiki (I did this one semester) and use the wiki's history and compare diffs features to see the same thing.

Ah, the possibilities...