New Media Assignment for First-Year Writing (20%)

While a couple of you may choose to completely transform your course assignments based on what you learn in this class, most of you will probably work to incorporate only some of this new media work into your existing classes.

In the next few weeks you will design one New Media Assignment that incorporates new media and/or new technologies in some meaningful and productive ways into a single "writing" assignment. WRT 525 students should design their New Media Assignments for a first-year writing class, but WRT 370 students may develop their New Media Assignments for any grades K-12+. To complete your New Media Assignment, you will write an assignment description (addressed to your students) and record a podcast (addressed to your classmates in WRT 525/370 that describes your assignment).

You will post your assignment description and podcast online to Moodle, and during the first month, we'll listen to three people’s podcasts every week, read their assignment descriptions, and respond to these works. The class will respond to your New Media Assignment (using a Moodle forum), offer suggestions, provide ideas for how you can improve the assignment or connect it to other work your students might be doing, etc.

Feel free to put your assignment description into student-friendly language, as if you were presenting this assignment to your class. Your assignment description will include a list of 2-4 goals for the project; a brief description of the sequence of activities, tutorials, lectures, discussions, peer reviews, etc that will lead your students towards completion of the project; and a draft of an assessment rubric (how you will grade the projects & determine if the goals were met).

Your podcast should be addressed to your classmates (and Lori) in WRT 525/370. Use the podcast to fill in many of the gaps in your assignment description: use this audio medium to describe the project in more detail; tell us more about your goals & why they're important to you and to students; give us more information about your sequencing of the activities; and tell us what you'd like us to respond to/help you with in our responses to your New Media Assignment.

Note that this entire assignment (both the assignment description and the podcast) results in only a peer review/discussion of these New Media Assignments. Please don't worry if you haven't worked out every little detail about your New Media Assignment just yet: we will be very happy to help you with your work-in-progress! I do not expect you to turn in a perfect New Media Assignment, but I do want you to think about the various steps, skills, and supporting materials that are necessary for such an assignment, and to begin imagining what kinds of new media work might support your students' writing and their learning in first-year composition. I also want you to have the benefit of bouncing your ideas for New Media Assignments off of our group of teachers/future teachers.

Some questions to consider as you design your New Media Assignment:

• What will students do to complete your New Media Assignment?
• What are the important learning experiences associated with your New Media Assignment?
• What will students learn or get out of your New Media Assignment?
• What other assignments or other learning might stem from your New Media Assignment? How might this assignment bridge into other work in your class?
• What skills, knowledges, experiences will your students take away from your New Media Assignment that may help them with writing tasks in their other classes or beyond?
• What will students need to know going into or beginning your New Media Assignment?
• What special information will you need to provide and what special skills might you need to teach students so that they may be successful with your New Media Assignment?
• What theories of writing are supported (or challenged) by Your New Media Assignment?
• How will you assess the work students have done? How will you assess what the students have learned from this assignment?
  

You will post both your assignment description & podcast to Moodle on the dates listed below.