Using Delicious In An Activity

I would use Delicious for an activity during my class meetings on language and style in public speaking.  Right now, I have two class meetings about this topic: one where I discuss language strategies used in public speaking to achieve qualities of rhythm, clarity, vividness, and one day when I talk about how those strategies can translate to style and levels of styles that are attributed to a given speech.  This activity would be best situated for the style class meeting since it builds upon what we would learn and review in the class meeting on language strategies.

I would split the class into six groups, so that two groups would be assigned to each of the three levels of style—grand, middle, and plain—that the book identifies.  The students in each group would have to work together to review speeches on AmericanRhetoric.com to find a speech that matched the level of style that they were assigned.  After locating an appropriate speech, the groups would complete a handout regarding the strategies and style of the selected speech and bookmark the link to the speech on Delicious.  In addition to presenting information on their speeches’ style in class, the bookmarks would serve as additional resources for students to use as they prepare their own speeches since I encourage my students to mirror other speakers’ use of language strategies in their presentations.  The bookmarks would make it easy for the class to return to speeches discussed in class since the tag feature could be used to identify style levels and strategies used in each speech.

There are two challenges that I can identify in this activity: lack of familiarity with Delicious and difficulty locating a speech that exemplifies their assigned style level.  In order to resolve the first problem, unfamiliarity with Delicious, I could offer a tutorial on how to use the site by posting the speech that we use in class during our first day on this topic.  Additionally, I could provide a handout with step-by-step directions for bookmarking their speeches, like the ones we received on Google sites.  For the second problem, I would have to approve the speeches first to ensure that the speeches met the style requirements and that there weren’t duplicates on the site.

Thoughts on the TPI

As I was reviewing Daniel Pratt’s article “Good Teaching: One Size Fits All?” as well as my scores on the TPI, I found myself wondering what perspectives my students might rank as dominant for themselves as learners in Public Speaking, the course that I teach.  Certainly, a test like this would differ in some ways from the TPI but could yield important insight into the perspectives that our students value in the courses that we teach.

Pratt writes that “a perspective on teaching is an inter-related set of beliefs and intentions that gives direction and justification to our actions.  It is a lens through which we view teaching and learning” (1).  The perspectives that compose Pratt’s model are derived from his research with educators across the world and their views on what good teaching is.   Since Pratt’s article and model focus solely on teachers’ perspectives on good teaching, we only see teaching through one lens: our own as teachers.

I imagine that a student version of a TPI-like test would reveal their perspectives on what approaches to teaching were best suited for their learning within a classroom.   How could this, coupled with our TPI scores, shape our teaching practices?  How important is it to consider students’ perspectives on approaches to teaching that help them succeed in learning?

Why EDHI 9040?

I’m taking EDHI 9040 this semester because I’m eager to learn about new resources to use in my classroom and opportunities for incorporating them into my class meetings. I’ve been teaching Public Speaking for the last four years that I’ve been in graduate school, and so often I only use the same four resources: Blackboard, YouTube and AmericanRhetoric.com for speech videos/texts, and PowerPoint to talk about effective visual aids.

I know that there are more resources on-line and even on the different course management systems that I use that I could be taking advantage of. But I don’t know exactly what those are. Once I can learn more about them, I’d also like to be able to incorporate them into sample teaching activities and receive feedback on them from other people. This way I can be sure that the activities are user-friendly and free of kinks when I do finally bring them into my classroom.

When I think back to my own undergraduate coursework, I can identify few times when we used technology resources outside of tools on Blackboard, PowerPoint, and maybe a few websites. And I don’t think that I suffered as a student as a result. I want to avoid using technology in the classroom as a form of entertainment for students who might see these resources a means of making the course more exciting and use it instead to create new activities to help my students understand and apply the course material, and maybe make some of my old activities more efficient.