Enough About Me: Putting Your Source Analysis Template to Work

 So, you’ve created a source analysis activity using this template– congratulations! Now you’re ready to make it available to others so they can, you know, analyze the source. 

Regardless of which method you choose, the first step is the same: From the story view, you’ll click the title of your activity at the bottom left, then click “Publish to File” in the menu that appears. This will bring up a window where you can confirm what you’d like to name the file and where it should be saved; an HTML file will then be created.

The menu that appears when clicking the title of your Twine story. 

The nifty thing about an HTML file is that, if you open it in a browser like Google Chrome or Safari, it will open as your game, playable and looking just as you designed it to look. If you open it in Notepad or something similar, however, it will be code– code that you can use! 

This possibility gives us a lot of options for how we might wish to share our activity. I’ve talked about mechanisms for doing this a bit previously, but it’s worth revisiting here to address one of the spaces almost all teachers already have access to: an LMS space. If you don’t already have one, you can usually create one for free, and many receive these spaces from their institutions automatically.

Here is a quick walkthrough on how to incorporate a Twine activity into the Canvas LMS, with concept and code courtesy of Laura Gibbs:

1. Create your HTML file. 

2. Pop that file into the Files space. You could make that file visible to your class, but would probably rather hide it from students.

3. In a new tab, open the Edit view of the Assignment or Page you’d like to add an activity to. 

4. Click the </> button at the bottom right hand side of the Rich Content Editor in order to open the HTML view. 

5. Copy and paste this code into the text entry field:

<iframe src="https://___/courses/___/files/___/download" width="100%" height="600"></iframe>

6. Go back to the tab in which you have Files open. Right click on the HTML file you just uploaded and select “Copy Link Address” from the dropdown menu that appears. 

7. Go back to the tab in which you have the Edit view of your assignment open. Select the bold text, right click, and paste the link you’ve just copied. 

8. Save and publish. 

To see this in action, enroll in this demo Canvas space and experiment with the items available in the Source Analysis Activity module (feel free to use a pseudonym). Into this space, I’ve added some examples of what the Source Analysis Activity can look like incorporated into an LMS as a page or an assignment. In the process, I’ve taken the opportunity to update things that were or have broken (for example, the link to the Arbella Speech that I used in the first iteration of the Source Analysis Activity has since become defunct). More significantly, I edited some of the language to apply more clearly to the Canvas environment– students no longer need either so many or so vague instructions about how to turn in their answers if the activity is embedded within an assignment, for example; the activity also no longer needs to collect their name to associate with their answers, but it does still need to instruct students on how to collect and turn in their answers into a format that can be delivered to the instructor by Canvas. 

One of the beautiful things about distributing your activity via an iframe in an LMS is that it works well on mobile– even the process of copying and pasting my answers into the text box was relatively straightforward when testing this on my iPhone.

 

I hope this inspires you to try this out in your own courses, even if only on an unpublished demo page. If you need a Canvas space to experiment in, you can create a Free-for-Teacher account. 

If you have questions or get stuck at any of these steps, feel free to reach out in comments, or schedule a quick chat with me via my Calendly. 

Flashback Post: Celebrating One Year at Everspring

I'm breaking into the midst of my series on the Source Analysis Template to celebrate one full year at Everspring as of today. This flashback post from June 2021 was my announcement of both my then-recent career move and my then-impending move to Chicago. Many things have changed since then, but two things remain the same: all the enthusiasm and the invitations it contains still hold! 

Photo by Chait Goli from Pexels.

I interrupt my usual programming for a brief life update: At the time of this post, I'm midway through my third week at Everspring. I've joined Everspring as a Faculty Engagement Specialist, working to support our university partners in their online teaching. You can read more about Everspring's work in the recently released impact report. I can't thank everyone I worked with at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning enough for giving me the experience to pursue this work and sharing their wisdom throughout the process of finding my path here. I'm thrilled to be beginning this new opportunity and building upon my existing skills in working with faculty and technology, and I've received a truly warm welcome from everyone I'm working with. 

This is a life update, but it's also two invitations. I'll be moving to Chicago in early August, and I'm looking forward to connecting with old friends and new colleagues once I arrive, so if you're in the area, let me know! I'm also open to talk about my path so far with anyone interested in using their humanities degrees in ways they may not have expected when they began their training, so feel free to reach out to me if it might be useful to you. I'm always happy to chat, and talking to people doing things I thought I might like to do has been instrumental to my own trajectory. 

Plug and Play: Source Analysis Template

Ever since I created the Source Analysis I activity, I've been wondering if there was a way to reduce the friction of creating a close reading exercise like this even further than just providing an example. Twine is a fairly low investment technology to pick up, but to start from scratch can be intimidating, and there can be a high barrier to trying new things for teachers who simply don't have much time to argue with technology. 

To help with this goal, I've created a template for making a source analysis activity similar to Source Analysis I. I have tried to make it as self-explanatory as possible to use (at least, if you’ve read the previous posts and/or demoed the Source Analysis I Activity), so feel free to download it and jump right in yourself! However, if you’d like a more detailed walkthrough to using it, one is coming. 

Download Source Analysis Template! 

This template is good for activities like: 

• Close reading of a fiction or nonfiction text guided by questions
• Encouraging annotation of specific passages
• Creating notes about a source that will inform a paper or exam question

For the particularly imaginative, you could also use it for:

• Having students read and dissect the key requirements of a paper or project prompt
• Reflecting on the different formats of a text (what different things did students pick up reading the piece in its original format versus within Twine?)

To start working with the template:

1. Download the Twine desktop app from Twinery.org and the HTML file for the template.
2. Once you reach the Story Listing in Twine, click “Import from File” on the Side Menu. Click “Choose File,” then select the template file.
3. The template will appear as a story in the Story Listing view.
4. Optional: This is a good point to do the following two actions:
   • Click the gear icon and click “Duplicate Story.” This will make a copy of the file so that you have the template for safekeeping, and a work file for your new activity. That way, you can go back to the template if needed, or duplicate it for other uses in future.
   • Click the Settings (gear) icon next to the file you plan to work in and select “Rename Story.” Give your activity a descriptive title, as this will appear in the activity once it is complete.
5. Click on your work file to open it.

In creating the template, I worked out a couple of irritations of the original:

• If using a link to an external site, placing it into the template as provided will now automatically open it in a new tab, rather than either opening in the existing tab (thus navigating away from the activity) or requiring users to right click and select "Open in a new tab" manually (which is annoying to have to remember). This update is thanks to this question and answer in the Twinery forum!
• The original activity required players to make a slightly unnecessary choice between whether they were going to write down their answers separately or in the input boxes. Although this was useful for the purposes of demonstrating two different approaches, it really wasn’t necessary for a template– if not using the input boxes, the creator can delete them, or the players can ignore them.

You may have noticed it’s been a while since my last post, and that’s primarily because every time I sit down to publish this template post, I come up with a new way to make the template or the instructions better which requires an additional hour of Googling, fiddling, and fighting with Blogger. I then created a bunch of content which felt like too much for one post; I like to keep these somewhat bite-sized. So, I’ve created a lot and split it into smaller, time-released bits, like those pain reliever capsules with the little spheres inside. (Is that what those do? Not sure, but they look fancy, so I’m going with it.)

Now, finally, I’m releasing the template out into the world, with the promise of additional supportive content to come, including a walkthrough (with a helpful video demo or two) and some upgrades to this template that you may like to experiment with. I’m also offering some small-group or one-on-one meetings for anyone who wants support or ideas for using this template; feel free to schedule an open time on my Calendly. And, if you decide to use it to create your own resource, I’d love to see the final product or hear about how you used it!

Year in Review: Goodbye, 2021!

It's time once again for my new yearly tradition, the Year in Review! An excuse to look back on what lessons have been spotted in the past twelve months. 

• Flashback Post: My Approach to the Lesson Plan - in preparation for a CITL workshop on Lesson Planning for Discussion Sections (a topic that everyone running a discusion section seems to want help with but which is rarely treated), I revisited an old post about lesson planning. 
  

• Pedagogical Possibilities: Quick Accessibility Tips for Text- After taking several online courses in accessibility in teaching and web design, I realized that that the tips offered tended not to be a part of the curriculum for developing teachers that I knew. This post set out to give some easy, quick pointers about making text a little more accessible, based on what I had most often observed in history courses. 

• Current Project: Portfolio Page- As I geared up job searching in earnest, I wanted to find a way to bring some of my work that was publicly available together in one convenient place, so that I might be able to showcase various pieces without suggesting employers look through the entire history of my blog or click links in my resume. The portfolio page I created here became a standard page on Lesson Spotted that I update periodically.

• Current Project: History SoTL and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion- My final piece of work as a graduate student, this post is a reflection on how scholarship on history teaching and learning treats DEI issues and suggests paths that could be fruitfully explored in the field. Submitted as part of my application for the Teacher Scholar Certificate at CITL.  

• Pedagogical Possibilities: If You're Drawing a Blank on Canvas- Just as my time at UIUC was winding down, the campus announced a switch to Canvas as the predominant LMS for university courses. This post aimed to set out some basics of Canvas for those apprehensive about the switch.   

• Current Project: Life Updates- Perhaps the most dramatic post of 2021, I talked about my new position as a Faculty Engagement Specialist, starting a new phase of my life and career. 

• Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting- As my interests and my daily activities changed, I have become more and more fascinated by using ways of communicating ideas that change my perspective simply by forcing me to reckon with medium rather than just a message. This post was an experiment in following that idea to a logical end: what if instead of writing a post about doing that, I made a post that was that? 

• Current Project: A Post That Took Seven Years (Kinda)- My dissertation became available for digital reading, a fact I reflected on here. 

• Current Project: Taking, Talking, and Thinking Through Career Development- An invitation to chat with folks in the UIUC History Department about career diversity prompted my to reflect on three mindsets that helped me in my career shift: taking, talking, and thinking. 

Fewer posts this year than last, but decidedly more upheaval; overall, a list of posts I think encapsulates the year gone by. Many posts center on life and career events, with only two posts I would characterize as outside of that dynamic. Looking ahead, I'd love to make an interactive year in review for next year. Here's to seeing what Lessons are there to be Spotted in the year to come!  

Current Project: Life Updates

Photo by Chait Goli from Pexels.

I interrupt my usual programming for a brief life update: At the time of this post, I'm midway through my third week at Everspring. I've joined Everspring as a Faculty Engagement Specialist, working to support our university partners in their online teaching. You can read more about Everspring's work in the recently released impact report. I can't thank everyone I worked with at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning enough for giving me the experience to pursue this work and sharing their wisdom throughout the process of finding my path here. I'm thrilled to be beginning this new opportunity and building upon my existing skills in working with faculty and technology, and I've received a truly warm welcome from everyone I'm working with. 

This is a life update, but it's also two invitations. I'll be moving to Chicago in early August, and I'm looking forward to connecting with old friends and new colleagues once I arrive, so if you're in the area, let me know! I'm also open to talk about my path so far with anyone interested in using their humanities degrees in ways they may not have expected when they began their training, so feel free to reach out to me if it might be useful to you. I'm always happy to chat, and talking to people doing things I thought I might like to do has been instrumental to my own trajectory. 

Current Project: Portfolio Page

 

This month's update is less a post and more a page: The blog now has a portfolio page, including samples of my work both on and off the blog. Check it out there, or see the contents below; if you have suggestions about content or features to add, feel free to reach out.

Workshop creation and facilitation

• How to Lead a Great [Socially Distanced] Discussion Section
• Summer Series 2020 Session 7: Active Learning from Social Distance

Mini-lecture

• Prework: What Can We Assess Online?

Voiceover

• Lining Up for Success: Coordinating Effective Teaching and Learning Strategies

Writing

• “Changing Bodies and Minds: ‘Crippled Children’ and Their Movement in the United States, 1890-1960.” PhD diss. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2021. 
• “‘Every One of Them Are Worth It’: Blanche Van Leuven Browne and the Education of the ‘Crippled Child.’” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2020): 324–50. doi:10.1017/heq.2020.28. (pdf available upon request)
• With Peter Thompson, “Reacting to the Past: A Conversation,” History @ Illinois, p. 4, 2017 

Teaching Materials 

• Current Project: Timetables and Timelines for The Underground Railroad
• Current Project: Time Travel and Crucible Critique
• Current Project: Fictionalizing West of the Revolution
• Current Project: Paragraph Structure and the History of Intelligence Testing
• Take My Advice: Promoting Communication

Technology 

• Adobe Spark; Various: A Sampling of Digital Tools to Support Classroom Engagement & Deep Learning (with Ava Wolf)
• Microsoft Office; Various: Pedagogical Possibilities: Quick Accessibility Tips for Text 
• Twine: Enough About Me: Using Interactive Fiction Tools for Source Analysis, Part I and Part II
• Twine; HTML: Enough About Me: Deformalizing and Deformatting
• HTML: Year in Review: So Long, 2020!

Updated September 2021

Pedagogical Possibilities: Quick Accessibility Tips for Text

Fact: It is one million percent easier to make something accessible from the outset than it is to make it retroactively accessible. Yet a lot of university instructors don't receive any training on how to make our course materials accessible; instead, we assume that no one in our classes will need "anything special" (which, if a course never enrolls any students with disabilities, that speaks of a concerning broader failure of access and opportunity). If anyone does need accommodations, this mindset goes, we'll worry about it when it comes up, and ideally it will be "someone else's job" to figure all this out. Your institution may have access to services to help with this, but they can often be difficult to access themselves, with long waits for materials and the need to prove the necessity of providing the material. There are also always things that instructors create and deliver themselves, often in the midst of the course, with no time to have someone else remediate them.  

Fortunately, there are many things instructors can do to make their teaching more accessible from the outset, and in ways that will save both you and your students a lot of logistical headaches down the line. In this post, I'll lay out three quick ways you can begin creating or remediating accessible course content, all of which include not only resources for instructors to create course materials but also strategies for involving students in the creation of accessible materials. This post focuses on text, but in future posts I'll take up other kinds of content. This is by no means a list of everything that needs to be done to make everything accessible to everyone. However, if you're unsure of where to start in thinking about accessible course materials, here are a few ideas.

Ensure that your foreground and background colors contrast.

Anyone else get a little too enthusiastic with the Powerpoint colors and then wonder if anyone will actually be able to read your slides? I use this Colour Contrast Analyzer a lot-- its super easy to download and use its eyedropper tool to compare the color of the text and background in any program to make sure there's enough contrast to fit WCAG guidelines. The ease of this program means that you can also encourage students to download the program and check materials they create.

For digital readings, confirm that your texts are actually full of text. 

As this image (from Monotype) suggests, if your text is an image, it's not accessible. 

Your lovingly created and curated readings are simply not going to inform anyone who cannot read them. How can you tell? Try highlighting the text in your pdf using the text selection tool as if you were going to copy and paste it somewhere. If you can't do it, your reading is just a series of images, meaning that screen readers cannot tell what it says; this state of affairs also makes it challenging for students to digitally highlight sections of the piece while reading for later reference. You can remedy this situation in several ways:

• Getting new scans of the text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Your library may be able to help with this. 
• OCRing your existing scans in Adobe Acrobat (if the quality is good enough). 
• Branching out to new material. Is there something that you can use in place of the older text that already has accessibility features, like a journal article instead of a scanned book chapter? Or, could you offer students the option of the reading or a podcast on the same topic?

If you still have scanned book pages with no text content in your course, make a goal to replace them (even if one at a time!) with texts that all students can access.

Use the "Check Accessibility" feature. 

There's a handy button in most Microsoft Office software which collects potential issues with access in documents like Powerpoint slide decks and Word files. Although these are far from perfect at catching issues, it can be particularly useful for things like confirming that parts of a slide will be read in the order that makes the most sense, or that sections have unique headings which will help users navigate the document.

If all of this seems like a lot, it's okay to do this a step at a time! As with most things in life, it's better to make incremental steps towards a goal than to never try to attain it at all.

Related links: 

I learned a lot of these great ideas from these courses: The Accessibility MOOC: Inclusive Online Course Design and An Introduction to Accessiblity and Inclusive Design. 

If you aren't familiar with the context of disability rights, the different models of thinking about disability, and how each of these inform education, the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's Creating Accessible Learning Environments frames these in a useful, informative way, as well as offering a host of links to other tools and strategies for accessible courses. 

The presentation standards at Society for Disability Studies offer useful guidelines for presentations, but many of them are helpful for other formats of conveying content to an audience as well.

Flashback Post: My Approach to the Lesson Plan

Next month, I'll be delivering a workshop on Lesson Planning for Discussion Sections (which UIUC folks should feel free to join me for--register here!) This post from early 2019 was the jumping-off point for me thinking about this topic, so I'm reposting it in preparation; I'd love to hear about which aspects of lesson planning for discussion sections you think should be included, or want to know more about, in the comments. 

A sneak peek of the objectives for February 8th's workshop.

Here is a confession from me: I am repeatedly skeptical of things and then, eventually, adopt them wholeheartedly. Here is a partial list:

• Asparagus
• Exercise
• Southwest Airlines
• Budgeting
• Casual gaming
• Savings accounts
• E-books
• Looking at the weather before you leave the house
• Bran
• Going for walks
• Rubrics (more on this another day)

So it should come as no surprise that I have come to appreciate the wonders of the lesson plan. Because there’s a variety of approaches to lesson planning, I had trouble figuring out what the point was in my early days of teaching, especially while TAing, in which many of the decisions about readings and course structure have already been made for you. So although I dabbled in the creation of lesson plans while I was a teaching assistant, they were generally brief lists of questions and activities scribbled on a piece of scrap paper on the way into my section. We read the reading; now let’s talk about it! Simple.

The year I taught two Reacting to the Past courses was similar in some ways— the structure of the games is either planned for you in the book or run by the students, so there are comparatively few days for which a lesson plan is useful. It wasn’t until my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course that I became infatuated with the lesson plan, and although I fell off the wagon a few times as the semester stretched on, I used a particular strategy to great effect. 

Here’s an example of a week of lesson plans from the middle of this course:

Let's take a walk through their components.

Up top: the week and day, to stay on track. Then, the purpose: what is the goal of the day? I’ll admit to being less than enamored with too much agonizing over long lists of objectives, but I find it really useful to have a straightforward statement of what we should be aiming for by the end of the period.

Then, a time breakdown of each step, beginning always with five minutes at beginning and end for hellos, roll, housekeeping, etcetera. This is great for reminding you that in fact, a fifty minute class often ends up being much less because of the small tasks that have to be done before one can start the film, begin the quizzes, or instigate group discussion. Likewise, it encourages you to think about the real factors that may delay your plans. If you are going from a lecture to assigned groups, how long will it take the class to move from A to B? If you allow for that in your plan you’ll save yourself some grief.

As I lay out each segment of class, I like to include both the length of time allotted to each and the time of day it should be at the beginning and end of that segment. I don’t follow this exactly while in class, of course— there are a million reasons why you might choose to follow a rabbit trail of discussion or allow a bit of time to review a reading that will throw you off of this path. But including both allows you the flexibility to go off path and then to see exactly how far off you are and make quick decisions about how to handle it.

As I mentioned above, I always end with at least five minutes for reminders and other housekeeping. This is useful to both students and instructor because it allows for checking in about ongoing or upcoming assignments; it also encourages you to end class on time, which I consider a mark of respect and professionalism.

Perhaps the most important thing about the lesson plan is that I print the plans for the week — even if unfinished— at the beginning of the week and carry them around. Then as I am leading class, working on other things, or reviewing course readings, I can write in changes or additions to future days. I also sometimes annotate them while class is ongoing, noting how I diverged from the plan. I still have a stack of lesson plans from last semester; I plan at some point to update the files using my annotations to use again for future courses.

Do you lesson plan? What things do you include or leave out?

Related links:

Some other approaches to lesson planning at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Algonquin College.

If you're interested in learning outcomes and objectives, check out the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.

New addition: If you want to talk about lesson planning or anything else with other UIUC TAs and grad instructors, I also host an informal TA Talks Virtual Happy Hour for CITL the first Wednesday of every month. Shoot me a message for the registration link! 

Enough About Me: Happy Three Years to Lesson Spotted!

It's this blog's third birthday! Three years ago I started writing about the connections between teaching history and everyday life. It's hard not to fall into cliche here; things are obviously very different since I sat down in the middle of a bus-, plane-, train-, and car-filled research year to write my first post, one about my travels and how they connected to my former classes.

Me 2017 vs. me 2020: different hair, different glasses, same affinity for cozy sweaters.

If you want to take a peek back at the history of this blog with me, click the button (a slight variation on this widget) for a random post. 

Thanks for joining me for the last three years of experimentation and change! I have no doubt the next three will be just as full of growth (though, let's hope, slightly less difficult for us all)!

Current Project: Online Learning Workshops Galore!

Screenshot of me making a video.

This month, I've been busy putting together a variety of workshops, presentations, videos, and online learning experiences about online learning (phew!).  You can check out this recap post for CITL's What You Need to Know workshop series about Session 7, What Can We Assess Online? You can also watch recordings of this and other sessions, view slides and prework from each session, or just read the posts for links, tools, and ideas. (Also, if you like idioms, you may enjoy Idiom Watch, a short snippet from the last session of the What You Need to Know workshop series which captures the tenor of our wide-ranging pre-session discussions pretty well).

I also had the opportunity to talk to my own department about online learning and tools they can use to change up the format of online discussion and assessment as part of an online learning workshop. I created a handout of links for the which offer resources related to each of the presentations that day as well as a list of tools and websites I used or referenced in my discussion. 

More recently, Ava Wolf and I have been co-facilitating a weekly live session for the July version of the university's Online Teaching Academy. The folks in our group are largely graduate student graders, discussion board monitors, or not teaching in Fall 2020, so we have enjoyed the wide range of questions and interests we've gotten to address, including how to make screen capture videos, tools to use for facilitating discussions and make grading more personable, and using rubrics to make your grading better and easier. (And yes, I do remember that I promised you a blog post on rubrics long, long ago-- soon!)

There's also a few upcoming projects: a video about office hours for the Graduate Symposium for Grading and Office Hours etext; a joint presentation with Ava on Online Collaboration for Socially Distanced Learning, and a session on active learning and lesson planning for the History Department Teaching Assistant Orientation. (Links above to other Lesson Spotted posts, because I've apparently talked a bit about these concepts here before-- who knew?) 

Current Project: What You Need to Know Workshops

Hi all! This month, I've been busy putting together two of the workshops for CITL's What You Need to Know workshop series. In lieu of a regular post this month, I hope you'll check out this recap post I wrote about Session 3, What Can We Assess Online? You can also watch recordings of this and earlier sessions, view slides and prework from each session, or just read the posts for links, tools, and ideas. I also hope you'll think about joining us for a future session-- upcoming topics include how to conduct online assessments, activities and engagement online, syllabus design, and my own workshop on Active Learning at Social Distance in Session 7.

(P.S. The image above comes from this handy virtual presentation on Online Assessment Strategies and Options.)

Plug and Play: The Handy (Digital) Dandy (Research) Notebook

It's been a challenging month (years from now, I'm sure future historians will marvel at how just about every piece of conversational writing begins with a similar observation; many people on the internet have made similar observations). I've been trying to figure out what I could post here that would be most useful-- more links to more online resources offering more ways to transition classes online? Reflections about historical epidemics and the history of medicine? Cute dog pictures to ease the stress? 

With perhaps the exception of the last, it seems like there are already enough of these to go around, written with more expertise than I have in distance learning, and epidemiology, and dog ownership, respectively. Instead, I wanted to offer up an activity idea I had recently, useful for both in-person and online classes, designed to aid writers of all levels in their research process: The Handy Dandy Notebook.

Okay, maybe one dog picture.
Winking black and brown puppy photo by Dominika Roseclay from Pexels. 

A few caveats: This is not only a fairly straightforward activity to assign to a class; it's also a pretty good reflection of my own research process on projects big and small, which means it's idiosyncratic; it may not be useful for the naturally organized, the meticulous outliner, or the linear thinker. However, it has been a lifesaver for me, and I often wish that someone had suggested this process to me as an undergraduate. Moreover, although I am envisioning it as it would be used in a history course, it could easily function for a lot of disciplines which emphasize finding, analyzing, and evaluating information from a variety of sources.

First, you'll need a shared online (semi-)collaborative space to work in. I like and recommend OneNote for this because it allows you to just absolutely dump things in indiscriminately-- you can type anywhere you like in the work area, handwrite with a tablet and stylus, drop in PDFs either as shortcuts to a download or embedded directly into the page, and highlight, underline, or scribble on any or all of those things with various pens. Those functionalities are fun and helpful; however, you can easily accomplish something similar with a Google Doc or set of Google Docs, a Word document uploaded to a course platform or Box folder, or a variety of other software options. 

Next, each student needs a topic. This could be put to great use as a research paper starter, particularly in the phase in which students have chosen topics but have not yet figured out which sources they will use. It could also work well as a way to give students a taste of a topic that you are about to begin discussing, revealing what mass culture has to offer on the subject before jumping into its academic treatment. For example, before students in my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course began our section on Westerns, I asked them to look online for any source that sparked their interest which purported to define or explain the Western and post it to a Compass discussion board. 

Third, each student needs a space in which to work (their "notebook"), and time in which to do it. If using a collaborative option, give each student a page or section of the shared space. You can outfit this however you like; you may wish to just indicate the name of the student, or you may wish to provide brief reminders, instructions, or suggestions based on their proposed topics. I would offer the following instructions at minimum: 

1. Copy and paste every link you look at into your space, and remind yourself a). what was in it and b). what you thought about it. 
2. This is not formal-- worry about "future you" looking at it, not "present me." That is-- these are designed to be resources for your project; it's not designed for me to evaluate how "well" your initial research is going. 

As far as time goes, I'd suggest giving students a rough, relatively brief amount of time that you'd like them to spend researching to limit stress and maximize the benefits of unstructured research time. 

Next, stand back and wait! Let students chase down their topics. 

Next up is classwide comparisons. When it comes time to discuss (in person, synchronously over Zoom or in a class chat, or asynchronously in a discussion board), they should examine others' notetaking styles and see what stands out to them-- do you see any techniques you'd take for yourself? What did others think was important, and how does that compare to what you noted about your sources? 

In my own work, it's about 50/50 that I return to my notes weeks or months later and think "Oh, right!" versus "Huh?" Optional but useful, depending on your goals: Have students return to these notes two or more weeks later in the semester. Do they still remember these sources? Do their notes make sense to them, or would they need to reread the sources if they wanted to write about them? This could be examined in an individual reflection, a class or small group discussion, or in the context of actually using the notes to craft a paragraph or other short assignment.

What does this activity, as a whole, do for students? At the most basic level, it encourages the beginning of reflection on a writing topic, offering permission for students to get started early. Perhaps more significantly, it offers students the chance to practice and get feedback on something that can be quite mysterious: the research process itself. Frequently when others have tried to introduce notetaking approaches to me, it has failed miserably because my writing (and, really, everything) style is chaotic; I need novelty and mess at the beginning before I can transition anything into order and linearity. This activity offers beginning writers both (to mangle a cliche) roots and wings: enough boundaries to feel secure enough to try; enough freedom to take a chance. Finally, and maybe most practically, by getting into a habit of noting literally every site and piece of information they look at online, a writer is less likely to struggle with both plagiarism and the frustration of tracking things down later that they didn't realize they'd want to use. It's only through trial and error that I've realized that it can be good to elaborate on where I found a document I'm making notes on as well as just the title and the author (was it Google books? An interlibrary loan? An archival document?), because it's never as easy to remember this a year on as I thought it would be at the time. It's also a very helpful tool for writing these blog posts-- where else would I get all the links I end up putting in? 

How do you help students practice good research habits in your discipline? Are you finding it more difficult to do so in the wake of moving instruction online? Let me know! 

NB: I hope you are all doing well in this stressful time. If any of you self-quarantining find yourself with more time at home than usual on your hands, want to share any of your struggles and triumphs of pivoting to remote education, or have questions or topics you'd like me to address, I'd love to feature your guest posts and/or answer your questions. 

Related links: 

Title talk: I'm very skeptical about this, but apparently if you want your own handy dandy notebook, you can buy one at this self-titled online store?

Authors that have talked about the type of writing that involves "making a mess and then cleaning it up," like Anne Lamott and Joan Bolker have helped me (and inspired this activity) immensely.

If you are looking out for resources for online teaching, I suggest UIUC's Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning list of resources for the COVID-19 transition to online instructional delivery. 

If you're lacking in a little light reading material, might I suggest this digital archive of 6000 children's books?

Pedagogical Possibilities: How to Teach Like Yourself

A purple roller beginning to paint an orange wall. Photo by cassidy muir from Pexels.

Since becoming a grad affiliate for the University of Illinois's Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning six months ago, I have become more acutely aware than ever how vulnerable it can be to teach, especially for a beginning teacher. As part of my work there, I meet with new teaching assistants frequently to discuss their teaching demonstrations from orientation or observe their classes. Many of them have the same concerns, and many of these are a.) not dissimilar from my own concerns about teaching and b.) rooted in deeply personal concerns about being liked, respected, or listened to.

Ostensibly, teaching is about the development of skills and the transmission of information; in practice, it can feel like a performance for an audience empowered to weigh in on all of your personal flaws and failings. Though my students have almost to a person been delightful and generous people, I still often have nerves going into the classroom. My desire to have things go well stems both from a strong interest in students' intellectual development and a deep-set fear that I suspect many of us have: that being disliked, or even just having an activity or lecture we've created fall flat, is a damning proclamation of our incompetence.

Many beginning teachers think of models that they've had in their own careers as students and attempt to model themselves on these people (I certainly have!). Yet often people's personalities differ from those of the best teachers they've had. Things that look and feel natural on one person on another feel stiff and uncomfortable, or too informal, or too overdone.

I don’t mean to suggest that the old chestnut "be yourself" will always lead you in the right direction or inoculate you from student criticism or hostility. Both anecdotal and data-driven evidence suggests that racial and gender bias impact student evaluations of teaching effectiveness (check out the related links for a few more takes on this topic). But keeping your own style and personality in mind can help you make decisions that work best for you in the classroom and to feel confident in the decisions that you've made. So, I want to share three things that I tell new teachers frequently:

The way you talk is fine (though maybe a little fast).

Too frequently, I think, we have been trained to think about presenting information as an opportunity to weigh in on people's style of speaking. Many beginning teachers, especially international students, who meet with me are worried about the way they speak, asking me if they were comprehensible during their lesson. Others hate the sound of their voice, or the way they pause and use filler words. Yet I have had almost no instances in which I had trouble understanding the teacher for any reason other than talking speed. Talking quickly is one of my own vices, and there are ways to manage this (which I may take up in a later post). Other than that, though, don't waste your life worrying about the way you talk. Students live in a world full of people speaking in all sorts of ways, and learning to listen well will only benefit them. What you say, and the interest you show when saying it, is so much more important than whether you're a beautiful speechmaker or sound like a native speaker of the language you're teaching in.

It's ok to be human-- in fact, encouraged.

I mentioned that talking quickly is one of my vices. I am very aware of this, and every semester I make my students aware of this too. I also let them know when I don't know the answer to a question they've asked, admit I'm wrong and correct the issue when they point out an error I've made, and give frequent opportunities for students to express ideas about the material that I may have missed. In short, my students are well aware that I'm human and thus fallible. This serves two functions: first, it helps them to know how they can relate to me-- if they have trouble understanding a lecture, they can ask me to slow down, for example. Secondly, just as being at the front of the room doing the instruction is vulnerable, being a learner is also vulnerable. To truly learn, a person can't just passively absorb information; they have to guess and check, get comfortable with being wrong from time to time, and identify areas for improvement. I try to model this willingness to be vulnerable. Not everyone may feel comfortable with this exact level or type of openness, which is fine (and gets to my next point); the important thing is that mistakes in the classroom are not the end of the world, and can even be part of the process.

There is no one perfect teaching style.

Sometimes advice-givers and workshop-leaders have a tendency to be a bit, well, bubbly. Outgoing. Irritatingly lively, even! I'll own up to it! This can give more reserved teachers pause-- they don’t know how to translate what they're hearing and seeing from this ball of energy into something they will actually be willing to do in the classroom. But there is no one way to be, as a teacher-- no singular method for presenting information, relating to students, or handling logistics. Part of your journey as a teacher is figuring out what works best for you, and students will respond to the strategies you use much better if you seem comfortable and confident in them. My classes have minimal lecturing and maximize time spent on group activities and class discussions, and I am fairly casual in chatting with the class. Students respond well to these strategies, expressing both mastery of concepts and enthusiasm for the course structure. I know other teachers who comport themselves more formally, who devote more time overall to lecture and have more limited, more organized class discussions and more individual projects. These teachers get positive responses as well. Both of these styles incorporate active learning strategies, skill development, and content delivery, but look very different. There are lots of good styles for teaching, and good teaching looks a little different for everyone-- so experiment, and find what works for you!

Related Links:

A sociological study of women faculty of color and their experiences of gendered racism from white male students in their courses.
An interesting Washington Post piece on trying to counter gender bias in collecting student evaluations through informing students about bias.
A professor of mechanical engineering reflecting in Huffington Post on his experience with trying to be a better teacher by modeling what other teachers had done, ultimately concluding it was best to "Be An Original: Be Yourself and Become a Better Teacher."