Course Materials

Summary This presentation was created for the combined ENG 099/ENG 101 ALP class which provides guidance on English composition fundamentals for writing essays. In this exercise, students learn how to narrow down a subject to a focused topic for a persuasion essay, then brainstorm techniques for developing a thesis statement. This step-by-step guide helps students understand the process so that they can apply what they learn when writing essays throughout the semester. My experience with the Connecticut Writing Project and ENG 552 Composition Studies informed the presentations I created for the ENG 099/101 classes I teach.

Summary I developed this brief video tutorial for my ENG 101 class to help students work through the process of writing a thesis statement. Once they've determined their focused topic for an essay, this guide demonstrates how to ask probing questions that lead to the main idea of what they intend to convey in their essay. The video guides students to differentiate between a thesis statement for a fact-based essay (eg., informative thesis) and an essay that states a position or makes a claim (eg., argument essay).

Summary This slide show was developed to demonstrate how to read a text as a writer. Students learn steps for engaging with a text, including annotation, highlighting, and drawing inferences. I also demonstrate the process of reading critically and model a variety of techniques for analyzing essays as well as multi-modal texts. This gives students the opportunity to see the difference between reading and reading critically while also collaborating on responses. For students who are reticent, this activity helps them gain confidence in their abilities to understand a text.

Summary One of the greatest challenges for first-year college students is conducting research, and one of my greatest challenges as an instructor is guiding students to move beyond Google as their default search tool. I created this video to demonstrate how to use the online library databases to conduct research for an argument essay. I selected the "Opposing Viewpoints" database to illustrate the "two sides" of an argument and how to find supporting evidence that is credible, relevant, and timely. Students use this information to refine their claim, provide evidence to support it, and develop counter arguments to the opposition.

Summary I created this presentation for an Introduction to Communication class in order to explain the topic of James Carey's Ritual Model of communication. In his view, communication is an interactive process that concurrently shapes and is shaped by culture. I used the analogy of social media to illustrate this concept and included a Poll Everywhere interactive poll to begin the lesson, then followed it with relevant examples from contemporary society. Even though Carey formed his theory prior to the explosion of the internet, his ideas are still relevant today.