Tag Archives: Tools

The Enemy is Powerpoint?

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Article: “We have met the enemy and he is powerpoint” by Elizabeth Bumiller.

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter. [Click on link above to read the whole article.]

Digital Texts in the Composition Classroom, Feb 25th

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Early adopters find ways to teach complex concepts, methods and software flying by the seat of our pants to be sure, but buoyed by much early trial and error experience acquired from having taught ourselves. For someone like me, whose field is digital media, I have made that seat-of-the-pants stuff my specialty, and, as a result, I am frequently called upon to teach less-experienced others how to teach using digital tools. One particularly challenging course in the English Department is First Year Composition. It may just be the toughest course to teach well and yet it is most often taught by our least experienced staff: our graduate students.

Those students recently asked me if I would come and lead a workshop for them on digital texts for the composition classroom. These new teachers face tough hurdles trying to retool green students into better writers. Their job gets tougher every year as what constitutes ‘writing’ continues to incorporate more multimodal objects (sound, image, video, etc.). The challenge for them is tougher still because they come from a generation that is often less digitally experienced than their students. Fortunately, in the English Department at least, they are not without resources. I lead a series of workshops on digital literacies, pedagogies, and research methods that give our students some tools for their own teaching up front, but they wanted more specifics that were designed for teaching the ever-so-unforgiving Comp. This workshop will take place on Thursday, February 25th from 12:00 to 1:30 or so in the eCreate Lab, located in Preston Hall 310. Please join us if you think the material might be of interest to you too.

Free, easy-to-use authoring tools that I will be discussing will include:

Voicethread, an online brainstorming tool for discussing texts, including powerpoint, video or screencasts

ccMixter, creative commons-based audio remixes

Piclits, an online tool for adding text to an image

Mixbook, an online scrapbook creator

Glogster, an online interactive poster creation tool

Xtranormal, an online text-to-movie animation creator

and

Animoto (for education version): an automated video creator that sutures narration, images, audio and video together into 30-second ‘trailers’

Drop me an email if you want more information: carolyn (dot) guertin (at) gmail (dot) com. If you come, be prepared to get your hands dirty :-).

Cheers,
Carolyn Guertin
Director, eCreate Lab
Dept of English
https://mavspace.uta.edu/guertin/portfolio/