[This post was originally published on September 25, 2012.] Your average student has developed a significant collection of digital work. There are Facebook updates, Twitter posts, YouTube videos, and Flickr and Instagram photos. I’ve been thinking about how to use…
Category: Bedford Bits
A Writing Assignment Time Capsule
[This post originally published on November 13, 2012.] One of my all-time favorite assignments is to ask students to create a time capsule focusing on their writing and themselves as writers. I’m not sure if it’s because of my obsession…
Create Short Videos with Edify Animaker
In my last post, I shared Lumen5, a site that allows you to make short videos by pairing free-to-use images with the text from a webpage or handout. Today, I’m sharing another simple, free tool that you can use to…
Convert Handouts to Videos with Lumen5
This weekend, I have been exploring the capabilities of the online tool Lumen5, a web-based tool that you can use to convert any written text to a video. Lumen5 offers to “Transform articles into videos in minutes” on their company…
Ten Active Learning Strategies Using Word Clouds
Last week, I reviewed several word cloud generators and suggested a few ways that you can use word clouds in the classroom. This week, I am sharing some ways that you can use word clouds in your classes to engage…
Updating Your Word Cloud Tools
Word clouds can give writers helpful information as they revise their work. As I explained in my previous post Word Clouds as Revision Tools, “Word clouds highlight the most frequently used words in a text, using larger font sizes for…
Crowdsourcing Your Video Captions
Ideally, every video that I upload to YouTube has closed captions and a transcript. Unfortunately, things are not always ideal in my world. When I have time, I have been using Screencast-O-Matic to add captions to the videos that I…
Three Steps to Better PDF Accessibility
When students compose assignments, I expect them to pay attention to accessibility in addition to the usual issues of content and format. After all, even the most brilliant document will be unsuccessful if readers cannot access it. When students are…
Asking Students to Visualize Their Progress
Since I am currently teaching technical writing, progress reports are on my regular list of assignments this term, but I also use them in both my first-year composition (FYC) and my digital media classes. The assignment works well in the…
New Resource on Academic Labor and Writing Programs
Earlier this month, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) premiered their Labor Resource Center. The site provides an amazing array of resources on labor equity and equality for both those working with and in writing programs and those researching…