10+ Things to Add to Your Community Action Toolkit

Vintage wooden toolbox filled with tools for woodworking
Image Credit: Toolbox by Florian Richter on Flickr,
used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

As I mentioned on my List of 10 on hashtags, I’m working on a series of assignments and classroom activities that will support the “Digital Assignments for Activist & Justice-Oriented Projects” presentation that I’m giving at the Computers and Writing Conference this year. In this list I’m moving on to community action toolkits (see examples below) and several overarching assignments.

First, let me explain what these toolkits are. Imagine you have a group of people all interested in a specific cause, but unsure how they can promote their work and gain other followers. That’s where these toolkits come in. They provide some background on the cause and why it’s needed, and, then, they outline how to promote and participate in the common cause.

Because community action efforts are typically grassroots movements, toolkits help those organizing and promoting their cause. Toolkits can include advice on reaching out to community supporters, the media, and the public. Further, they can include step-by-step instructions for common tasks that support community efforts, such as writing letters to politicians and government officials as well as to media outlets such as letters to the editor and comments on news websites. The name of these collections, toolkits, are a perfect analogy: these collections provide the tools and resources that a community effort can use to promote its cause.

Deciding on the Composing Strategy

These assignments and activities present opportunities for students to create their own community action toolkits, focusing on the ways that writing and digital composing contribute to activism and social justice efforts:

  • Individually-authored Toolkits: Use this assignment as a course-long project by asking each student to create their own toolkit, working individually. Based on the length of your course, suggest the number of documents students should compose. If appropriate for your course, choose specific items students need to complete. Allow for some choice among options as well.
  • Small Group-authored Toolkits: Arrange students in small groups, and have each group choose a community effort for its focus. Ask each group member to contribute to the toolkit by creating one (or more) components of the report. The entire group is responsible for framing the toolkit and ensuring consistency in the overall document.
  • Class-authored Toolkits: Choose a community effort as a class, and have each student in the class contribute to the overall class-authored toolkit. The class can begin by collaborating on design guidelines to make the assembly of the document smoother.
  • Individual Projects: Instead of creating a complete toolkit, choose any of the components listed as an individual writing assignment. For example, everyone in the class writes an FAQ on a local community action campaign.

Choosing a Local Focus

If possible, students will choose a local community action efforts and create their toolkits to support those efforts. The activities can work for larger efforts as well; however, students may find that resources already exist. For example, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has published a StopBullying.gov Community Action Toolkit that takes on the campaign to end bullying in schools. Rather than duplicating such work, students can provide resources specifically focused on what the local community needs.

When working on local community efforts, students can also benefit from closer access to the audience and stakeholders for their toolkits. For instance, students working on an anti-bullying campaign on campus can connect with administrators and faculty who support their cause and with some persuasion, possibly have their toolkits adopted for local use.

Deciding on Media for Interaction

In addition to choosing the kind of community action students explore, you can narrow their projects to particular kinds of interaction—anything from fairly traditional print communications to highly visual or interactive broadcast or social media. Here are the most obvious options:

  • Open Guide: Students can write a general guide without restrictions. Anything that fits the genre goes. Students can decide if they want to focus more specifically.
  • Guide for All Media: Students ensure that their guide covers a variety of media, including print media, social media, video and broadcast media. A broader toolkit of this sort is perfect for class-authored toolkits, as it broadens the list of components to include.
  • Guide for Social Media: Students focus specifically on community action that uses social media as the primary communication tool. Resources in the toolkit would focus on sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok.
  • Guide for Broadcast Media: Students produce broadcast-ready videos that can be shared on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Videos can also be embedded on websites and in blog posts as well as distributed to local media outlets (e.g., open access channels and local community television stations).

Toolkit Components

Your Community Action Toolkit can include a variety of resources. Depending upon the needs of the community and the goals of the community action group, you can add information to tell readers about the group and its work as well as resources to help readers participate in the work of the group. Once you determine who your readers are and establish the purpose for your toolkit, choose among the following items to include in your toolkit:

  1. Background on the Campaign & Need
    Every toolkit needs some background information that explains the cause and persuades readers to join in working for change. Tell the story of your cause and the needs it will serve. Remember that stories make your cause personal, so focus on a specific person or people who have or will benefit from the campaign. Be sure that your background information convinces readers why the cause is important to the community. Keep your paragraphs short and clear, and add photos that help tell your story.
  2. Timeline
    Provide a fast review of the key accomplishments the community has reached and the levels of need that exist. Your timeline can include past events as well as upcoming milestones. Try using a tool such as Knight Lab’s TimelineJS to create an online timeline for a web-based toolkit.
  3. Info Sheet or Fact Sheet
    People interested in the community effort can use the fast facts from an info sheet or infographic to convince others to support the cause and to promote the group’s work. Create a one-page sheet that provides the most important details about the cause and how the community works to solve it. See the “Intimate Partner Violence and Transgender Communities: Factsheet” (on page 7) for an example of the genre. If your toolkit is to be a print document, you might increase the size of your info sheet to a two-page spread. Incorporate document design and graphical details to make the info sheet easy to understand. Use the Fact Sheets resources from Kent State to learn more about info sheets.
  4. Infographic
    Identify significant data related to your cause and create an infographic that visually presents the details.
    Read the article “Designing Effective Infographics” (2018) from the Nielsen Norman Group to find out more about infographics. You can find Infographic templates on sites like CanvaVenngage, or Easel.ly. [Teaching Note: For a more structured assignment, use The Infographic Project from Writing Commons.]
  5. Campaign Schedule/Key Dates
    If the community action group has upcoming events, create an agenda or a calendar that indicates the dates and provides those who use the toolkit with the basic information they need to participate in the events. For events that take place regularly (like an annual activity), you can point to past resources to show the successes the campaign has had. Adobe Express (formerly Spark) and Canva include calendar templates.
  6. Case Studies
    Stories will draw people into the campaign, as they read how others faced challenges and worked to succeed. Add case studies or success stories to the toolkit to demonstrate the impact that the community effort can make. Tell the story from a participant’s point of view, integrating quotations and descriptive details that show the reader how community action has made a difference. Photographs of the people in the story will emphasize that these are real members of the community who have benefited from community action. For examples, see the Appendix: Stories of Success (p. 71) in the Be the Change—Community Action Toolkit. If you have before and after images that you can include, use the Juxtapose tool from Knight Lab to create slick comparisons that show the change.
  7. Instructions on How to Participate
    Readers who are new to the community need instructions that show them how they can participate in the work of the campaign. Choose activities that fit your toolkit, and provide step-by-step details on how to accomplish them. For a social media toolkit, for instance, you can provide instructions on how to participate in an Instagram Hop, a Tweetstorm or a Twitter Chat. Consult the technical writing resources on Writing Instructions for help with the genre. Read the StopBullying.gov Resources (p. 33) for an example of step-by-step instructions.
  8. How to Contact a Politician
    Add instructions on how to contact government officials and elected representatives to ask for support of the community action project. Include step-by-step details on how to identify specific people to connect and how to compose effective messages. Further, provide sample letters, text messages, and phone/voice mail scripts that readers can use as models. Consult Section 1. Writing Letters to Elected Officials from the Community Tool Box for examples of what this section can include. To understand how audience effects toolbox documents, compare Contact Elected Officials (written for family adults) and Contacting Your Representatives (written for youth advocates)—both from the Community Action Toolkit: A Guide to Advancing Sex Education in Your Community.
  9. How to Write an Op-Ed or Letter to the Editor
    Letters and public statements can share the community action through newspapers and television sites as well as through blog posts and similar forum sites. Add instructions that show members of the community how to compose their messages and provide advice on submitting them to local media outlets. The “Writing Opinion Editorials and Letters to the Editor” resources from the CDC’s “Community Action Toolkit: A Guide to Advancing Sex Education in Your Community” (2021) are a good model. You can also find useful ideas in Tips for Working with the Media (p. 22) from the StopBullying.gov Community Action Toolkit.
  10. Shareable Images or Videos
    Create a collection of easy-to-share images and videos that community members can post in their social media networks. Focus on images and videos that focus on your main message without any clutter. Videos can focus on public service announcements, brief testimonials, and news from the community. Follow the guidelines for image size and shape and video resolution and length that are recommended on the sites where they will be shared. For instance, choose square images to be shared on Instagram.
    Section 19. Using Social Media for Digital Advocacy from Justice Action Toolkit | Community Tool Box outlines useful background information. The shareables and Twibbon resources in the 2020 Global 16 Days Campaign Social Media Toolkit and Social Media Posts for COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters are useful examples.
  11. Sample Posts
    Compose ready-to-post status updates that community followers can easily copy and paste on their social media networks. As with shareable images and videos, Section 19. Using Social Media for Digital Advocacy from Justice Action Toolkit | Community Tool Box provides useful tips. Text Messages for Community-Based Organizations to Encourage Vaccination and the Community Action Month- Mini Toolkit #1 provide sample text messages to copy and use. In addition to posts meant to be copied and pasted, consider other kinds of messages that community members may find useful. The Social Media Safety Toolkit for Veterans, Their Families, and Friends, for example, directly addresses the possible issues that their community may face by including Sample Responses to Posts and Tweets That Indicate Emotional Distress (p. 4).
  12. Slideshows
    Design PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides presentations that can be used to share details about the accomplishments and goals with the community and that community members can use to encourages others to participate in the efforts of the group. Check out the Presentations section (pp. 12–18) of Effective Tools for Communications and Leadership in Indian Country for useful advice on creating presentations. For examples, the sections of the Justice Action Toolkit | Community Tool Box include Powerpoint presentations that summarize the information included on each topic in the toolkit. Use the tabs above the Main Section to switch to a link allowing you to download the presentation. You can also create slideshow carousels, or Stories, that rotate on social media sites like Instagram. See How social justice slideshows took over Instagram for more details.
  13. FAQ
    Gather a list of questions that community members may have about the cause or about the community actions to support it, and then provide clear answers to each one. Use the
    FAQs on COVID-19 Vaccines for Essential Workers in Agriculture as an example. Find advice on writing FAQs from ZenDesk’s “8 great FAQ page examples and how to create your own” or Truckee Meadows Community College’s “FAQ Writing Guidelines.”
  14. Glossary
    Go through your toolkit and identify words and phrases that community members may be unfamiliar with.
    Your list can include abbreviations and acronyms, proper names of relevant parts of the organization or of documents that the group relies on. For each word or phrase, explain what it is and how ti relates to the community. See the Glossary (p. 72) in the Be the Change—Community Action Toolkit for an example, and consult Writing Definitions from the Purdue OWL for help with the genre.
  15. Additional Resources
    Gather links to additional resources that provide community members with more information or tools to use as they work toward the community’s goals. Include direct links to the resources and short annotations that explain what the resource is and how it will help the community member. Add subheadings to help community members find what they need easily. For examples, see the list of Further Resources (p. 10) from the Community Action Toolkit for Addressing Intimate Partner Violence Against Transgender People and Social Media Suicide Prevention Resources and Additional Suicide Prevention Resources (p. 8) from the Social Media Safety Toolkit for Veterans, Their Families, and Friends. Consult the Annotated Bibliographies resources from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for tips on writing annotations.

Example Toolkits

Center for Community Health and Development. (2020). Justice Action Toolkit | Community Tool Box. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://ctb.ku.edu/en/justice-action-toolkit

Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. (2020). 2020 Global 16 Days Campaign Social Media Toolkit. Global 16 Days Campaign. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://16dayscampaign.org/2020-global-16-days-campaign-social-media-toolkit/

National Association for State Community Services Programs. (2016). Community Action Month- Mini Toolkit #1. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://nascsp.org/community-action-month-mini-toolkit-1/

National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. (2017). Community Action Toolkit for Addressing Intimate Partner Violence Against Transgender People. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://avp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ncavp_trans_ipvtoolkit.pdf

National Congress of American Indians, & Pyramid Communications. (2011). Effective Tools for Communications and Leadership in Indian Country. National Congress of American Indians. https://www.ncai.org/news/tribal-communicators-resources/NCAI_ConferenceBooklet_FINAL_SinglePage.pdf

Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). (2018, November 18). Community Action Toolkit: A Guide to Advancing Sex Education in Your Community. SIECUS. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://siecus.org/community-action-toolkit/

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2021, December 16). COVID-19 Community-Based Organizations Toolkit. WECANDOTHIS.HHS.GOV. https://wecandothis.hhs.gov/resource/community-based-organizations-toolkit

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2017). StopBullying.gov Community Action Toolkit. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://www.stopbullying.gov/sites/default/files/2017-09/community-action-toolkit.pdf

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. (2022, February 10). Suicide Prevention—Mental Health [General Information]. https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/suicide_prevention/prevention/index.asp

Verhoeven, Andii. (2014). Be the Change—Community Action Toolkit. World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. Retrieved May 6, 2022, from https://www.wagggs.org/en/resources/be-change-community-action-toolkit/

 

 

Free-to-Use Visual Assets for Digital Projects

African American woman working on a World War II dive bomberGood visual assets can take a digital project from average to awesome. Add the photo on the right, which shows an African American woman working on a World War II dive bomber, to a research project on the role of African American women in the war effort, and the project goes from simply talking about the vital role these women played to showing them in that role.

Students usually understand the value of adding such images. Their challenge is finding images that are free to use and that do not violate intellectual property rights.

Earlier this month, the Library of Congress shared collections of assets that are perfect for student projects, all available for easy download. Free to Use and Reuse Sets from the Library of Congress offers collections of images on topics like these:

  • African-American Women Changemakers
  • Civil War Drawings
  • Women’s History Month
  • Gottleib Jazz Photos
  • Presidential Portraits

For students working on video projects, there is even a collection of Public Domain Films from the National Film Registry. There are even collections of images of Cats and Dogs.

In addition to these custom collections, students can browse the millions of items in the Library’s Digital Collections, which includes photos, scanned pamphlets, and audio and video recordings. The items in the Digital Collection will give you a chance to talk about what makes an asset “free-to-use” so that students can learn how to determine whether they can use the resources they find.

The Library of Congress’s teacher resources provide examples for Citing Primary Sources, which you can use as you discuss documentation and attribution. The teacher resources also include Themed Resources and Primary Source Sets, which may provide even more resources for students to use in their projects. 

Finally, in case students think they’ll find nothing but dry historical resources on the site, you can use the 1914 photo below to talk about the evolution of LOLCATS.

Four kittens entangled in yarn

I’m sure you will find something delightful that you can use on the Library of Congress website. Tell me what you find and how you’ll use it in a comment below; and if you have free-to-use resources to share, post those too! I’m always eager to add to my collection of resources for students to use.

Photo: [1] Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee, by Palmer, Alfred T., photographer, Available at https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsac.1a35371/; [2] The entanglement, by Frees, Harry Whittier, 1879-1953, photographer, Available at https://www.loc.gov/item/2013648272/. Both images from the Library of Congress, and used under public domain.

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

Designing Visual Outlines with Graphic Organizers

Rough outline of a talk on white collar work tips for developer types by Michael Cote on FlickI have asked students to informally outline all of their projects this term. I am not strict about the form of the outlines. They can use jot lists, topic outlines, tree structures, or any kind of map that shows their plans. I never use strict sentence outlines myself, but I believe that all writers can benefit from at least jotting down the plans for their documents.

As they begin work on their final project of the term, students will create visual outlines by designing their own graphic organizers as part of their work. Students are familiar with outlining and graphic organizers from their experiences before college. Both teaching strategies are widely used in K—12. After reviewing their prior knowledge on the topics, students are ready to create their own visual writing tools, as described in the activities below.

Background Readings on Outlines

Background Resources on Graphic Organizers

Class Activities

Think, Pair, Share, and Compare

This activity is a customized version of the active learning strategy Think-Pair-Share, which will help students recall their prior knowledge. Divide the class into two groups. Working independently, have individuals in one group think about and take notes on what they know about outlines while the individuals in the other group focus on graphic organizers. After students have had time to gather their thoughts, have them pair with someone who worked on the same topic. In their pairs, have students review their notes together and talk through their thinking.

Draw the class together as a whole and invites pairs to share their thoughts on how outlines work and then to share their thoughts on how graphic organizers work. Note their ideas on the board. Once all of the ideas have been shared, ask the class to reflect on the information and then compare the two strategies (outlining and graphic organizers). Encourage students to draw conclusions about how the two strategies connect to writing.

To strengthen their understanding of outlining and graphic organizers, ask students to read and review the background readings and resources listed above.

Design Graphic Organizers

Ask students to examine example graphic organizers (linked above) as a class or in small groups and to identify the features of the genre. In particular, encourage students to determine how shapes are used (like text boxes), how lines and arrows are used, and how labels and instructional text is used. Their prior knowledge about graphic organizers should allow students to gather this information in five to ten minutes.

With this information about graphic organizers established, students create graphic organizers for the kinds of writing that they are working on. Ask students to consider what they know about the kind of writing by examining examples and background material about the genre. Students can create graphic organizers independently, or you can walk them through some basic steps by asking questions such as the following:

  • What are the primary sections of the kind of writing you are examining?
  • What are the typical features of those sections?
  • What kind of information usually belongs in the sections?
  • How do the sections relate to one another?

Students can sketch out their graphic organizers on paper, and then use a tool like Canva to create final versions of their organizers. Note that Canva does have a number of existing graphic organizer layouts that students can use as models. Students can also create their graphic organizers in a word processor using the shapes and text box tools.

Do limit the time students spend creating their graphic organizers. The purpose of this activity is to learn more about how a kind of writing works, not to spend hours on images and design.

After students finish their graphic organizers, they can share them with the class for feedback as well as to create a library of graphic organizers that everyone can use. The organizers can be used both for writing projects and to organize the analysis of readings.

Final Thoughts

In my course, students are focusing on different kinds of writing, depending upon their majors and career goals. There is little to no overlap in the graphic organizers they are creating. With a more homogeneous class, students could design graphic organizers in small groups. They might work on the same task or on different aspects of the writing task, such as creating graphic organizers for gathering ideas, research, and beginning a draft.

This activity uses active learning strategies to get beyond customary pen on paper (or text on screen) strategies. Do you have similar assignments that break out of the traditional writing activities? I would love to hear from you. Please leave me a comment below

Photo credit: Page 01: Idea for a talk on white collar work tips for developer types by Michael Coté on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

What’s the Story in Your Data Stream?

[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 this collection of artifacts since  Antero Garcia  reminded me that there is a “huge stream of student data to look for growth in.”

[Photo:  text message by sffoghorn, on Flickr]

What are positive ways to use all that data? I’m not interesting in mining that data for indications of what strategies do or do not work. Instead, I’d like students to find their growth and changes in that stream of data themselves. Happily, I’ve found inspiration for an assignment that I think will do just that. I simply need to ask students to look for the stories in their data stream.

Oddly, this idea came to me when I read a story in the  Georgia Southernalumni magazine. I’m not an alumnus of Georgia Southern, so I almost threw the paper into the recycling unopened. It only ended up in my mailbox because I have donated to the  Graduate Research Network  (GRN). Curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to skim it in case the GRN was mentioned inside.

Instead, I found a story about Jessica Hines, a photography teacher at Georgia Southern. Hines searched through her own data stream to learn more about her brother Gary, a Vietnam War veteran who took his life. The story from the alumni magazine isn’t online, but you can read more about Hines in My Brother’s War: Professor Acclaimed for Images of War Experience.

Two things caught my imagination from the piece. First, my eye tripped on the title, “Hines teaches students to tell  story of themselves  through photography.” The grammarian in me either wanted to add the word  the, change  story  to  stories, or perhaps both. Still the idea of telling stories with photographs drew me in, since I’ve been searching for multimodal assignments recently.

My interest piqued, I read on and found my second inspiration. Hines talked about her teaching as an introduction to her own search to learn more about her brother:

“I explain to my students that the camera is a device that, by pressing a button, shows them what they are interested in,” explains Hines. “The potential for self-discovery is high if one pays attention.”

What would happen, I wondered, if I sent students off to look through their data stream for their stories with the intention of learning more about themselves and their interests in the process? I knew I had found a positive way to use that “huge stream of student data.”

The assignment I have in mind asks students to look back through their data stream for recurring themes or topics and to compose a text about how their ideas have changed over time. I want them to consider questions like these:

  • Has your interest in the topic or theme deepened over time?
  • Have you slowly lost interest?
  • Have you learned increasingly more over time?
  • What has influenced how you feel about the topic?
  • What have you noticed as you look back at how you’ve documented the topic or theme over time?
  • What stories have you found?
  • What discoveries have you made about yourself?

For now, I’m leaving the medium for the text open. The piece could be a traditional text, but the assignment also lends itself to video, photography, and multimedia compositions. I’ll also leave the places students search for these stories open, rather than limiting the activity to just photographs, for instance.

Finally, I am hoping that I can avoid the Creepy Treehouse effect,  since students choose the stories that they tell. They will pull their stories together in an independent piece that won’t require me or the class to visit their private postings. Students will curate the collections only with data they feel comfortable sharing.

In addition to reflecting on their own stream of data, I hope this assignment will also help students learn more about finding and analyzing how images or themes develop in a body of work. The assignment reminds me of the skills that I use when I trace how a poet uses a specific motif through a series of poems or how a novelist develops an image over the course of a novel.

What do you think of asking students to explore their own data stream? Do you have ways to tap the stream of student data? Do you have an assignment to share? I’d love to hear from you. Please leave me a comment below!

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

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 website. The end result, Lumen5 explains, is “Social videos made easy.”

How Lumen5 Works

To use Lumen5, you create a project and then begin producing your video. Lumen5 gives you three choices, shown in the screenshot below:

Screenshot of Lumen5 Options for creating a video

As the image shows, the interface is clean and easy to understand. You add the required information by clicking on one of the three options:

  1. You can use an article or blog post by pasting in the link to the document.
  2. You can copy and paste text from any document you have access to.
  3. You can start with an empty video and add text and resources as you go along.

For this post, I am going to focus on what happens when you choose the first or second option. Whether you have pasted in a link or the text for your video, Lumen5 next adds your content to a series of video panes, similar to slides in a slide deck. Each sentence in your content is displayed on a pane. If your sentence is long, it is divided into two panes.

In addition to sorting the text onto the panes, Lumen5 pairs the content with an image (either in public domain or free to use) based on the keywords it finds in the text. For example, if the text talks about writing a paper, Lumen5 will add a photo that shows something related to writing. It might be a photo of a person writing, an image of hands on a keyboard, or a picture of a notebook and pen on a table.

Once the first draft of your video is auto-generated, you can spend time editing the draft by changing the text on the panes and choosing a different image, video, or icon to represent the content. To change the text, you just click on the pane and type. For the images, you choose the media tab, and then you can either search the libraries available in Lumen5 for an image or you can upload media of your own. You can also choose from one of the free-to-use soundtracks or upload your own.

Once you are happy with your video, you click the Render button and wait about ten minutes for the video to process. Once the video is ready, you download the MP4 file and upload it wherever you’d like to share it with your students. Lumen5 even provides a help page on downloading and sharing your video to a various social networks.

A Sample Lumen5 Video

I decided to experiment with a digital handout on my course website that explains the labor-based grading system to students (See Inoue, 2014), paired with a tip-filled infographic on how to do well in the course. The result of my project is the following video:

All in all, I’m quite happy with the results. I spent about three hours on the video, most of which was spent being overly picky about images and the background music.

Constraints of Lumen5

There are some limitations in  Lumen5. I used the free version of the tool, which allows you to create an unlimited number of videos in 480p video quality. The free videos do have a Lumen5 logo at the end. If you want to remove that logo or record in a higher resolution, you have to pay a hefty fee of $49/month. For the work that I would do, the free version will likely suffice.

Lumen5 does not allow for voice-over, only the soundtracks as background music. Since the finished video is downloaded as an MP4 file, it is easy enough to open the downloaded file in another program, like Camtasia, if you want to add a voice-over. As there is no voice-over, you do not need to add a closed caption file. All of the text is already on the screen.

Students with visual impairments do need a transcript of the text of the video however. The text in the video is not readable by a screen reader. I created a transcript for my video by copying the text out of Lumen5 and pasting it into a Word document. After applying formatting to make the file easy for a screen reader to navigate, I saved it as a PDF and uploaded it to my own website. Making the transcript took me less than ten minutes overall.

There are some other minor limitations. You have little control over the color of the content on the screen, for example, and it’s difficult to deal with awkward line breaks. Given that the slick tool is free, however,  I find these constraints  quite bearable.

Final Thoughts on Lumen5

If you are interested in adding some simple videos to your course, I encourage you to experiment with Lumen5. It was a simple enough tool that I would use it with students as well, if you are working on a video assignment. Go visit the Lumen5 website and give it a try; then, please come back and tell me what you think. I’m eager to hear your thoughts about this exciting tool!

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

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 make for my students. Here’s an example video that I made to show students how a new blog commenting system works.

Viewing Tip
Click the closed caption icon that is shaped like a box with lines of text in it, in the lower right band where the controls are, to see the captions on this video. The icon is shown in the image below, all the way to the left.

To make the captions on this video, I used the speech-to-text capability built into Screencast-O-Matic Pro. Unfortunately, you do have to upgrade to use the speech-to-text tool, but the cost is an economical $18 annually. The tool created a rough draft of the captions, but I had to go through and edit them by adding words and phrases that it missed and correcting things that it misheard.

The whole process took a little over an hour, which may not seem bad until you consider the length of the video. The video is only 3½ minutes long, so I spent about twenty times the length of the video to make the transcript. Now extend that time commitment to a 10 minute video, and you need to plan at least three hours. That’s quite an undertaking for something that will only result in 10 minutes of curriculum material.

Fortunately, YouTube includes a setting that allows a video creator to crowdsource the captioning for the videos that she uploads. From my perspective, it’s the most important setting on YouTube. Just follow the instructions to Turn on & manage community contributions and anyone can add captions to your video. The system allows you to review, change, or reject the captions.

I already have an assignment that invites students to crowdsource transcripts. This YouTube setting facilitates their contributions to the course smoothly, and as a bonus, it reduces the work I have to do since the captions are added directly to the videos. In addition, students can contribute by adding to existing captions if they notice a correction is needed. I still plan to create captions for all my videos, but it’s nice to know that these alternatives exists.

Do you have suggestions for improving the process of providing transcripts and captioning for video and audio content? I would love additional ideas and assignments. Please tell me about your ideas by leaving a comment below.

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

New Resource on Academic Labor and Writing Programs

Word Cloud made from the pages of the Labor Resource CenterEarlier 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 writing programs.

Housed on Colorado State’s Center for the Study of Academic Labor website, the collection of resources grew from ideas exchanged at a pre-conference institute at the CWPA conference in 2013. Now, five years later, the newly launched center provides artifacts and materials that focus on the labor issues most relevant to writing program administration.

The Labor Resource Center includes example documents and guidelines that can help answer questions such as:

  • What is typically included in a job description for a director of first year composition?
  • What should I pay attention to if I am writing a self-evaluation of my work as a faculty member?
  • What examples are available for student evaluation of teaching?
  • What should a candidate keep in mind during a job interview? What should a search committee consider?
  • What position statements address working conditions?
  • What databases are useful for research on writing instruction and academic labor?
  • What should I read if I want to learn more about working conditions for composition faculty?

As the site explains on its home page, it is “(Always) In progress.” Its Forthcoming Pages/Projects link indicates that the site will ultimately include additional materials including an FAQ page, details on job negotiation, sample contracts, and research on class size.

Whether you are a newcomer to teaching in the composition classroom or an experienced administrator, you will find relevant resources on the CSAL website. I encourage you to visit and explore the already rich collection. If you have suggestions for materials to add to the collection, you can email Seth Kahn, who serves as the chair of the CWPA Labor Committee and is the primary administrator for the site.

 

Image credit: Word Cloud from the CWPA Labor Resource Center by Traci Gardner, on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

My Grading System FAQ

Screenshot Excerpt of Canvas Grade Book by Traci Gardner on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 licenseThis week I want to share an additional resource that I’ve written to help students understand how my labor-based grading system works.

First, though, I want to review the materials that students already had available. I explain the grading system on the course website, on the Requirements page (from the current semester). To help students understand how they are doing in the course, I have a page that outlines How Grades Are Recorded in the course grade book.

I also share two infographics to further the explanation. One describes what happens When Your Grades Are Based on Labor. Another provides a flowchart that shows How Project Feedback Works in a course with unlimited revision.

Even with these resources, students have told me in comments on course evaluation forms that the grading system I use can be confusing. To address the ongoing questions, I created the following FAQs that answer the questions directly:

Grading System FAQ

Why do you use a labor-based system?

I believe that a system that allows you to keep working until you get the results that fit the workplace is more humane than a system that punishes you if you aren’t perfect on the first try.

I know there are lots of situations in the workplace that require perfection. If you submit a bid to a client that has errors, for instance, you may not get a second chance—but that’s in the workplace. You are still in the classroom.

The labor-based system allows you the chance to learn and improve. You can make mistakes and try again. You can take risks, and if they don’t turn out, your grade will still be okay.

How does this system relate to the workplace?

I have worked in quite a few places, and in none of them did I ever receive a letter grade for the work that I did. Never ever. It just doesn’t work that way.

Sure, my writing was read by others I worked with. Sometimes it was good enough to go out to the intended reader right away. Other times it had to be revised first. Grades just weren’t part of the system.

In the workplace, you are assessed on how hard you work and what you accomplish. Managers expect you to show up, put in your best effort, and accomplish the goals that your company sets. If you do nothing or the bare minimum, you will be reprimanded or fired.

Grades in this course are based on a similar system. You earn your grade based on your labor—on the time and intensity that you put into your writing and collaboration. You are not punished for making mistakes as long as you work to improve throughout the term.

What’s the research behind this system

I adapted this strategy from Asao Inoue’s work on contract grading, labor-based grading, and anti-racist assessment strategies.

You can find additional publications on anti-racist assessment and on grading students’ labor on Inoue’s Academia.edu page.

Why is this system better for students?

The most important benefits of this system are explained in the When Your Grades Are Based on Labor infographic. To summarize those benefits, a labor-based grading system allows you to

  1. Focus on Ideas (Not Mistakes).
  2. Write for Yourself (Not for Me).
  3. Take Risks (Don’t Play It Safe).
  4. Have Do-Overs (No Penalty).

This labor-based system allows you to continue working on your projects until your work reaches the level that would be acceptable in the workplace. Your grade is not affected by what you haven’t learned yet, and you are free to try out ideas as you like.

Why is there no partial credit?

Work in this class is either ready to use in the workplace (and graded Complete) or it’s not ready (and graded Incomplete).

Think of it as a binary system. There can only be 1 or 0, Complete or Incomplete. There isn’t any middle ground, so there isn’t partial credit.

The thing to remember is that when a project is returned as Incomplete, you can always revise it until you do have a piece that is ready to use in the workplace. There is no punishment in the system if your work isn’t quite ready, but there’s no credit either.

How are labor logs part of this system?

You document the time you spend on activities and the level of intensity you put into your work in your labor log. You can think of tracking your work in your log as a parallel to tracking billing codes for what you do in the workplace.

I have no way of knowing what you are working on or even how much you are working in an online class. In a face-to-face classroom, I would see you working in the classroom. I could tell if you were working intensely, working at an average pace, or not working at all. Since I cannot see your work myself, I need you to tell me what you’re doing.

Additionally, you will use your labor log to gather details about your work when you write your final exam. Keeping track of what you do in your log is easier than trying to remember the details of what you did at the end of the term.

Why is there so much emphasis on peer feedback in this system?

In the workplace, you will find yourself reading and commenting on the projects of your coworkers frequently. The peer feedback activities you complete with your writing group give you the chance to learn more about that process. Writing in the workplace is as much about what you write as it is about how you help others with their writing.

Just as importantly, peer feedback helps you improve your own writing in two ways. First, and maybe most obvious, you get advice on your draft that you can use to revise your document. Second, by reading drafts written by your classmates, you can see strategies that will help you improve your own work as well as notice errors that you can later check your own work for.

Naturally, you cannot copy other people’s work; however, you can see useful ideas that you can make your own. For instance, you might read a draft that does a great job with headings. When you return to your own draft, those headings will stick with you, and you can use their example as you revise your own draft.

So what do you think? I haven’t added any details that are not included elsewhere on the site; but perhaps the question-and-answer format will help students find the information.

Do you have any suggestions for clarifying the system? How do you explain your grading system to students? I would love some suggestions from readers. Just leave me a comment below.

 

Image credits: Screenshot Excerpt of Canvas Grade Book by Traci Gardner on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.

A 1—3—5 Revision Activity

Reichsstraße 135 number.svg by 3247's Image Wizard, on Wikimedia CommonsLast week, I wrote about Online Identity Revision Plans. Today, I want to share a focused activity that fits online identity revision as well as revision in any writing classroom. This activity is modeled on the 1–3–5 rule used in planning and to-do lists. The goal is to change revision from an overwhelming challenge to fix everything into a targeted plan to improve the document.

The 1–3–5 Rule for To-Do Lists

Using the system, you divide your to-do’s into three categories:

  1. Simple tasks that are easy to complete.
  2. Medium tasks that take a little more work.
  3. Large tasks that take more time and require more effort.

As this Post-It Note article explains, “A small task might be washing dishes after dinner, while a large task might be preparing your garden for spring.” After you prioritize your tasks, you create a to-do list for the day that includes one large task, three medium tasks, and five simple tasks. The Muse shares a simple template to structure the to-do’s in their article “A Better To-Do List: The 1-3-5 Rule.”

Applying the 1–3–5 Rule to Revision

It’s fairly straightforward to adopt the 1–3–5 rule as part of a revision activity:

  1. Ask students to prioritize their revision tasks into the three categories:
    1. Simple tasks
    2. Medium tasks
    3. Large tasks
  2. Choose tasks to complete: one large task, three medium tasks, and five simple tasks.
  3. Focus on those nine tasks in your revision.

Easy-peasy, right? Students determine what counts as simple, medium, and large, and then they follow their plans to revise their drafts or online identity. As teachers, we know that what is simple for one writer may be quite large for another, so this system works well for differentiated instruction. Students are in control, choosing what fits their needs. With the same structure as the to-do list version of the rule, students can even use The Muse template (above) as a handout.

Customizing 1–3–5 Revision

If students in the writing classroom need more structure than the open version of 1–3–5 Revision provides, you can easily customize the activity to fit your course. Rather than simple, medium, and large tasks, describe kinds of revision. For instance, focus on the difference between surface-level changes and deep revision with this 1–3–5 Revision schema:

  1. Conceptual Change: Think about changes to your overall idea and development. You might change your thesis or supporting paragraphs. This change will require working throughout the draft to change the way the ideas are conceived.
  2.  
  3. Structural Changes: Consider how the document is put together. You might rearrange ideas or work on how sentences work together. For instance, you might set a goal to work on sentence variety in your introduction.
  4.  
  5. Surface Changes: Focus on style and mechanics. You might look at word choice or a particular comma rule.

Another option for 1–3–5 Revision activity focuses on where the revision effort is centered, like this example:

  1. Paragraph Level: Think about changes you can make to your paragraphing that will strengthen your draft. For instance, you could think about a way to unify your paragraphs or about a strategy that improves paragraph openings.
  2.  
  3. Sentence Level: Look at how sentences work together to improve the draft. For instance, you might set a goal to work on sentence length by combining sentences, or a goal to make the phrasing concise and direct.
  4.  
  5. Word Level: Examine the individual words in your draft with a goal to increase their effectiveness. You might consider whether the words in your draft are concrete and specific, and make changes to improve the phrasing, such as deleting filler words.

These custom versions simply help students with the process of prioritizing their revision plans by showing them which kinds of revision are valued and the amount of effort that they should apply. Surface changes should be simple tasks while conceptual change should be a large task. Like the 1–3–5 Rule for To-Do Lists, the specific attention to prioritizing according to guiding categories should increase the effectiveness of students’ revision plans.

Keep Revision Active and Specific

No matter what kind of 1–3–5 Revision strategy you try, encourage students to keep their 1–3–5 plan active. ProfHacker’s “3 Ways to Makeover Your To-Do List” begins with the suggestion to “Start Each Task With a Verb.” This strategy stresses the action involved in the revision task rather than the end result or a need that should be met. Rather than adding “details” as the one large revision task, for instance, begin with a verb that says what to do about or with details. The actively-phrased task on the 1–3–5 plan might be “develop concrete details in the body paragraphs.”

Active phrasing has to be paired with specific and well-focused ideas. A writer might list “work on concise phrasing.” While that idea begins with a verb, the writer still has to figure out how to “work” on that phrasing. What exactly is she going to do? She could strengthen her revision plan by specifying exact strategies to apply to the draft, such as “delete unnecessary filler words, such as really and very.”

Final Thoughts

The 1–3–5 rule structures revision in a way that asks students to think more deeply about the work they need to do on their drafts. The strategy requires that students move beyond the idea of making corrections. It requires them to choose tasks that are more than simple editing and proofreading. While making the revision process move beyond surface errors in concrete ways, this 1–3–5 activity also makes the revision process specific and manageable. There are just nine tasks to complete, and at the end of the activity, the student should have the satisfaction of a checked-off list of to-do’s.

What do you think of this revision activity? Are you willing to give the 1–3–5 Revision strategy a try? Do you have revision activities that work well with students? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

 

 

Photo credit: Reichsstraße 135 number.svg by 3247’s Image Wizard, on Wikimedia Commons, used under public domain.

This post originally published on the Bedford Bits blog.