Lesson Materials: See below
Lesson Objectives: 1. Understand how to use Blogs@Baruch; 2. Introduce the affordances of multimodal composing
Connection to First Major Paper/Project: This lesson will help you start to analyze the rhetorical situation particular to writing on a website. Hands-on activities will help you better understand assignment criteria and how to accomplish smaller tasks. Review of sample websites will help you visualize what your own website might look like.
Connection to Course Goals: This lesson fulfills the course goal of learning to compose in a variety of media. Today’s activities will help you prepare to compose on a website, paying attention to audience, purpose, and genre and to how the act of publishing online affects these elements of a rhetorical situation.
Day One Activities:
- Getting Started with Blogs@Baruch: The professor will share a PPT presentation by Lindsey Albracht, a Blogs@Baruch specialist.
- Key Definitions: Review key definitions in the context of multimodal composing.
- What is Multimodality? : Watch this short video to learn what multimodal composing is.
- Website Rhetorical Situation: Using this handout, analyze the rhetorical situation for your website assignment.
Day Two Activities:
- Elements of a Strong Personal Website: Using a PPT, we will identify and discuss elements such as font choice and size, color, headings and subheadings, and other important aspects for building your site.
- Evaluating Sample Personal Websites: In this activity, we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of students’ personal websites.
- Establishing an (Academic) Digital Identity: In this activity we will think about the manner in which we engage, share, promote, and present ourselves online, and how an individual’s digital identity is intricately connected to their overall identity. 1. Read the short article. Take Notes. 2. Then, Google yourself and take note of what you find. 3. In pairs, you will compare what you found, and then have a discussion as a class.
Day Three Activities:
- Best Practices for Web Writing: Review and discuss this web writing guide.
- Buzzfeed Style Guide for Online Writing: Learn about the set of standards for the internet and social media described in The BuzzFeed Style Guide.
- In-Class Writing: The first draft, due in the next class, requires that you have a link to your website, and that the website is fully organized and functional. It also requires that you have at least 50% of your writing (bio, resume, and blog post) completed. Use the remaining class time to work towards these goals.