Author: David

Summative Grade

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The summative grade is the grade you receive at the end of the semester, where the goal is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

Your summative grade will be computed based on the following formula:


Element Portion of Final Grade
Building a Homestead 5%
Literacy Narrative 10%
Unpacking Manuel’s 10%
Podcast 15%
Analyzing Wolf in White Van 10%
Fiasco 10%
Side Quests 10%
Class Participation 10%
Final Portfolio with reflection 20%

Create an avatar

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Now that you’ve created your subdomain, you need an image to represent yourself and/or your site for the class: a player character avatar. Your avatar can be whatever you want it be but try to create something that both reflects you’re personality and speaks to the topic for this class in someway.

Start by choosing one or more of your own photos as the basis of the avatar, drawing something yourself and scanning it, or finding one or more CC-licensed images on Flickr that you can modify. Make certain to keep a note for yourself of the URL for the photos you use if they are not your own.

Crop and otherwise edit the photo(s) in a photo editing application (like Photoshop or PicMonkey). You can create a layered or collage effect, if you’d like. Add your name on your badge in such a way that it’s legible. You might also include your domain URL, but that’s not required.

Your final badge should be square and at least 512 pixels wide and high.

When you’re done, you’ll need to put the image two places, with an optional third:

First, load the badge into your Media Library and publish it to your site in a blog post. Include information and links in the post about the source(s) for images included in your badge. Write a paragraph or two about why you chose those images, what aspects of yourself and your interests are represented in your badge, and/or what difficulties you faced in creating the badge.

Seconly, go into your dashboard to Appearance > Customize > Site Identity and load the image as your favicon/site icon.

Finally, if you do not already have a gravatar (which is almost all of you), create a gravatar account connected to whatever email you use when you comment on sites for this class and load your avatar there. From then on, your avatar will show up as your picture when you leave comments here and on other students’ sites.

Podcast Reflection

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Once you have completed your podcast episode, you should write a reflection post, published to your own site. Embed the Soundcloud episode in your post (if I haven’t published the episode yet when you publish your post, just edit the post later to add the link once I have).

Your refection should be 250 – 500 words and should be in the form of an essay with complete paragraphs, not as a list of bullet point answers.

Reflection Questions

Include a brief description of your process for developing the podcast. How did you and your assistant producer divide up the tasks involved and how did you structure your collaboration? In what ways does your episode respond to the other episodes in the series — in other words, compare your episode to the ones before it, explaining how you gained inspiration from, adapted, or resisted something that your peers did in their episodes.

Please describe your primary goals with the episode that you produced and explain the strategies that you used to achieve them. You’re producing these episodes under a number of time and technological constraints, so it’s likely that there will be some goals that you just cannot accomplish within those constraints — address what challenges arose for you and the choices you made to meet them and/or describe what you would have done differently had you more time/resources available for your episode (in other words, what are some aspirational goals that were perhaps unrealistic given the constraints of the assignment but that you would have liked to have tried to accomplish if circumstances were different?).

How do you see your work on the podcast episode helping you to achieve the learning outcomes for this course? Link to the specific learning outcome posts that applied to your work on this assignment, and explain how you met that outcome with your work on this assignment.

Make sure you address the sets of questions above and then also consider some of the questions below and address them in your reflection (you definitely won’t be able to answer all of these, so go through the list and pick some that seem to be most of interest for you and write about them):

  • Were the strategies, skills and procedures I used effective for this assignment?
  • Do I see any patterns in how I approached my work on this episode? How was producing a podcast similar to or different from writing more traditional essays?
  • What have I learned about my strengths and my areas in need of improvement?
  • How am I progressing as a learner?
  • What suggestions do I have for my peers as they go about working on their episodes to come?
  • How can I apply the skills I used in crafting this podcast episode to future writing projects? Where can I use these skills again?
  • What are you most proud of about the episode that you created?

Rhetorical Situation

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Rhetoric means communicating with a purpose or in an attempt to persuade an audience to do or believe something. Rhetoric also refers to the study of such communication.

The rhetorical situation, then is the context within which a writer or speaker carries out such communication. You can begin to understand the rhetorical situation of an act of communication by analyzing:

  • Purpose — Why is this person writing? What effect(s) does the writer hope to achieve?
  • Audience — Who is this person’s intended audience? Are there multiple different audiences? What strategies does the author use to get the message across to those audiences? What sorts of stakes do those audiences have in the message?
  • Context — Who is reading this text (which might include other audiences the author never intended or considered)? What specific contexts apply because of the way this text is being presented right now? The same text read by different people, in different times or places, presented with different purposes, can have very different contexts.

Braziller & Kleinfeld, The Rhetorical Situation

Evidence

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  • Data
  • Sources
  • Backing

BEAM

In “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing,” Joseph Bizup advocates for a new vocabulary around the use of evidence and sources for students. Instead of primary, secondary, and tertiary as the main classifications of sources, Bizup proposes the acronym BEAM:

  • Background for materials a writer relies on for general information or for factual evidence;
  • Exhibit for materials a writer analyzes or interprets;
  • Argument for materials whose claims a writer engages; and
  • Method for materials from which a writer takes a governing concept or derives a manner of working.

Work Cited

Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27.1: 2008. 72-86.

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