The following information about rubrics is from Donna Elkins, Chair of Humanities Division Southwest Campus.

Using Rubrics to Respond to and Evaluate Student Work

What is a rubric?  A rubric is a set of scoring guidelines for evaluating students’ work. A rubric indicates the criteria you use to judge student performance, and distinguishes different levels of quality in student work.

Why bother with rubrics?  There are three good reasons to use rubrics.

1.   Good rubrics clearly identify the instructor’s expectations and how to meet those expectations. They help define the quality of work expected of students.

2.   They can help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others’ work. When used to guide self and peer assessment, the rubric can help to identify strengths and weaknesses in students’ own and one another’s work.

3.   Rubrics can reduce the amount of time instructors spend responding to and evaluating student work.  Instructors can use the language and categories of the rubric to give students feedback on the quality of their work. This can reduce the amount of time trying to explain the flaws and strengths in the work.  Moreover, if students use rubrics to self-correct or peer-correct their work, instructors will receive more highly developed work.

In addition, rubrics serve several other functions (Barbara E. Walvoord, Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame)

• Allow the instructor to make the process consistent and fair
• Show the instructor what to teach
• Help students participate in their own learning, because they know where they are aiming
• Save instructors having to explain criteria to students after they have received their grade
• Help team teachers grade student papers consistently
• Help teachers of sequences courses communicate with each other about standards and criteria
• Form the basis for departmental and institutional assessment

 A copy of Donna Elkins’s Professional Development presentation on Assessment Made Easy: Using Rubrics to Link Learning, Grading, and Assessment is here.

You might also check out this website Rubistar for help with rubric design.

The Downtown Campus library offers instruction to students in three main ways:

Public Workshop Series

We typically have 4-6 workshops each week in the DT Library on a variety of information literacy topics.  Popular sessions include Intro to the Library; Find It!: Finding Magazine and Journal Articles; and Beyond Wikipedia.  Many faculty offer extra credit for attendance, and we can provide certificates for students who attend sessions.

Focused Sessions for a Specific Course

ENC 90 We usually offer a version of our Intro to the Library Program with a short exercise using standard reference sources (Dictionary and Encyclopedia)

ENC 91 A version of our Intro to the Library Program with a demo of the library website and a short exercise finding articles in the Gale Database.

*MLA Citation information optional

ENG 101 A version of our Find It! Workshop. Typically we’ll demo the library catalog and a couple of our databases. We like to base the session on the topics your students will actually be researching so please include that information in your request.

&  MLA Workshop: In this workshop students will create a short MLA style Works Cited Page, including at least one book and at least two magazine or journal articles from our library databases.

ENG 102 A version of our Find It! Workshop. Typically we’ll demo the library catalog and a couple of our databases. We like to base the session on the topics your students will actually be researching, so please include that information in your request.

&  MLA Workshop: In this workshop students will create a short MLA style Works Cited Page, including at least one book and at least two magazine or journal articles from our library databases.

GEN 130

The Library offers several sections of GEN 130: Introduction to Information Resources each semester. Students will be introduced to basic research skills and will apply MLA style as they create an annotated bibliography.

To request a session for your class(es) send an email to jf-dt-lrcreservations@kctcs.edu .  We can come to your classroom if you have computers, or we can use one of our electronic classrooms for a program.  Since participating in the Mark Taylor workshops last year, library faculty are especially interested in making sure our programs are relevant. We’ll typically ask you to give your students a preparatory assignment, as well as offering credit for the exercise used in class (and we’re willing to grade those, if you don’t have the time to grade another worksheet!).

A printable version of this article is available here.

Experiences that are common begin to feel normal. Each semester plagiarism shows up in about ten percent of my student essays. Although I believe that getting rid of plagiarism requires vigilance, checking for it takes five to twenty minutes per essay. I want to deter plagiarism, but it’s not easy and I can’t prove that I’ve solved any problems long-term by simply catching it. My efforts might help to deter plagiarism, but I have found that catching cheaters is only part of the process of getting rid of plagiarism, but it isn’t the only way.

For me, the first step is to ask my students to write a short sample the very first class. These samples are handy for checking competence, but they also provide a standard of comparison. That way, as the semester progresses, I can check when I see radically anomalous improvements in their writing. My second step is to require my students to send their documents attached to an email. Now, I have their documents in digital form. My third step is to closely and carefully check all of their listed sources and citations by copying and pasting their source information into Google. Fourth, I have changed my computer’s display settings to make all of my documents appear gray. Besides being easier on my eyes, anything copied and pasted contrasts in bright white against the gray document. Stuff they typed themselves will be gray. Fifth, I discovered quite by accident that if I sweep my pointer across their essays line by line, my pointer changes when it finds embedded, but invisible hyperlinks. With a single click, those hyperlinks usually take me right to that plagiarized source. Sixth, I use a plagiarism finding software program. Again, I copy and paste their essays right into the software. These programs are great because they tell me exactly where the source(s) can be found. This software even checks free essay exchanges and buy-your- essay sites. Seventh, I do a search for content-related articles by copying and pasting the student’s information, especially suspect sections. Eighth, I double check the works cite pages to make sure that any borrowed sources I find in my online searches were listed by the student. I check and recheck my findings because I don’t charge anyone with plagiarism unless I have the evidence to prove it. Most students won’t deny it when you place the source materials right next to their essay. Sometimes, a student will say, “I forgot,” or “I was confused about MLA citations.”

Of course, some students inadvertently make it difficult to copy and paste their text into my plagiarism software. If they add line breaks or extra tabs and spaces, I have to laboriously correct all of these problems before checking the document for plagiarism. Most of the time, I fix these issues by taking the time to teach each student how to correctly do paragraphing and double spacing during teacher/student meetings. However, one student had figured out that I couldn’t check for plagiarism until I fixed his essay which—despite the time it took—I did. Buried behind these formatting problems was obvious plagiarism.

Blatantly overconfident students are usually the easiest to catch. I love the ones who copy from Wikipedia, and then try to hide it by making the font uniform in size and color. When I view their essays on my computer, the text sharply contrasts in white against my gray background. Secondly, there are always hyperlinks that show up that they have missed. I find these, click on them and they take me right to their plagiarized sources on Wikipedia. One student literally lifted his entire essay from Wikipedia with no attempt to hide it. He also didn’t cite Wikipedia on his web page.

Another student turned in a document that contained classified information. When I checked his sources, I was warned that I didn’t have the proper military security clearance. When I saw him again, I asked the student, “Are you in the military?” “No,” he said. “I ask because when I checked the sources in your essay, I noticed that a military clearance was required…” He knew where I was going, “My roommate is in the military and he wrote my essay for me.”

Another student turned in an essay that was so radically different from his writing style that I was suspicious. When I saw him in class, I said, “I looked at all of your previous writing samples and this last essay is professional quality. It doesn’t even look like your writing. Did you write this essay?” Without hesitation he confessed, “No actually my sister wrote it. But she gave me permission to use her writing, so that’s not plagiarism.” I had a difficult time persuading him that it really was plagiarism. Even the F on his essay didn’t convince him, but no, he did not wish to set up a meeting with the department head to see whether or not he was right.

I also catch the ones who use the paid or essay-exchange websites. I have a list of these websites. Many of these paid or exchange-essay websites allow you to see a short sample of their catalog of documents so you can “shop” for the right essay to match the assignment. A lot of students will use these free samples. My plagiarism software roots through those samples and tells me right where to find them. One of my students actually listed one of these cheat sites as her source. I gave her credit for citing her source but warned her that these sites were designed to help students cheat.

I’m sure these efforts that I make are pretty ordinary among most teachers, but I do more than just “catch” plagiarizers. I am also proactively campaigning against plagiarism in my classes. While discussing the topic with students, I have found something interesting. Most students feel that plagiarism is more wrong than I previously assumed.

In fact, in studies of student attitudes, nearly 90% of students polled seem to feel that plagiarism was wrong (Scanlon and Neumann). Perhaps the inroad to solving the plagiarism problem is to use the social pressure from their peers’ real core beliefs. Exposing the ten percent (or higher) who plagiarize to what their peers have to say about it could have a profound effect. If this minority of students were to realize that their peers were not as “soft” or morally ambiguous on plagiarism as they believe, they might not be so likely to cavalierly take the risk of cheating.

In 1988, I tutored a student who was returning to college after being kicked out for a period of five years for plagiarism. It wasn’t an administrative decision to boot him out; it was a student judicial review board that chose this punishment. He lost scholarships, financial aid, and he was not allowed to return to any state-funded community college or university in Illinois.

At the beginning of each semester before I assign any papers, my first strategy is to have “the talk” with my students about plagiarism. To get them thinking about how they feel about plagiarism, I use a stripped-down Thurstone Crime Scale (first devised in 1927) to discuss their attitudes about plagiarism, and I create a simple comparison metric on the board writing crimes like murder and rape at the top and jaywalking and parking tickets at the bottom (Stone 1). In the middle, I place theft and fraud. I ask students where they would place plagiarism on my crime scale. I always hope to segue into talking about moral ambiguity, but what I found in my small samplings was that they take plagiarism pretty seriously. They generally place it just below the middle, below theft and fraud. When asked about appropriate punishments for plagiarism, their punishments were pretty harsh, ranging from expulsion from the university to arrest and conviction.

Catching cheaters isn’t the only way to deter plagiarism. I spend time talking to each class and ask them to quantify their attitudes about plagiarism so they can all hear the consensus opinion from their peers. Hearing from peers may influence their behavior more than some rule in a handbook, an edict from a professor or a statement in the syllabus. After my “talk” about plagiarism, I take the time to teach them how to cite their sources correctly. My goal is making sure they don’t plagiarize their way through school. I have found that it is not a high priority among the experts. My assertion may be proven in that many writing text books put the citing sources and plagiarism chapters far later in the text. To change students’ minds, plagiarism should be our highest priority.

Works Cited

Scanlon, Patrick M. and David R. Neumann. “Internet Plagiarism among College Students.” Journal of College Student Development. VOL 43 NO 3, 374-385. MAY/JUNE 2002.

Stone, Mark H. Ph.D. Thurstone’s Crime Scale Re-Visited. Institute for Objective Measurement, Inc. Web. 20 August 2011. <http://www.rasch.org/pm/pm3-53.pdf>

• Printable Version of this Article

Beginning of Semester Checklist

At the beginning of each semester you will need to make sure your courses are ready and available to students. Below you will find steps to ensure your course is ready for student access.

1. If your course is completely online and offered statewide through KYVC: Go to www.kyvc.org and look up your course in the Programs and Courses area to ensure your courses are listed correctly. This allows prospective students to search for online courses offered through KCTCS. If you need to update course information and are unsure how, contact KYVC toll free at 1-877-740-4357.
2. KCTCS courses will be listed on your Blackboard portal. To access the portal go to http://elearning.kctcs.edu. You will login with your normal active directory (webmail/Peoplesoft) login. If you’ve logged in to the Portal and you don’t see your course:
1. Check with your department/campus Peoplesoft administrator and make sure your course is listed with the correct Web mode.
2. Check with your department/campus Peoplesoft administrator to ensure you are listed as the instructor.
3. If both of these are done and you still don’t have a link to your course shell, email us with course number and section.
3. If you see a course with an 8888 code, this is either a training course or a development course. The 8888 code is for virtual. We set it up this way, so access would not be turned off. Training shells will be deleted after 90 days. Development shells will only be deleted if inactive for 6 months. If you no longer need the Practice, development or training shell, send us the course code and we will have it removed.
4. If you are not using Blackboard to deliver your online course, you must go into the Blackboard shell and add a link to the site where your course will be hosted.
5. If this is the first time you’ve taught the course, you may begin developing your course at any time. If your shell isn’t created yet, you can use request a development shell from your Distance Learning Coordinator.
6. If you are teaching a bi-term course, put a message in your courses letting students know when it begins. This helps on calls received by students wondering why the course isn’t available or complete.
7. In Blackboard you may have created content in the Course shell, Practice Shell or Development Shell. The two most prominent ways to move the content to the actual shell is through the COURSE COPY TOOL and the Export/Import Tool. Below you’ll find directions on each of these.

Copy Course

This method can be used as long as the course with the content is in your Blackboard Portal.

1. Login to Blackboard at http://elearning.kctcs.edu and go to the course shell that has the content to be copied.
2. Click on the Packages and Utilities in the Control Panel
3. Select on Copy Course Materials into an Existing Course (the first option – DO NOT USE the copy exact course)
4. Under step 2, Select copy options, click the Browse button and select the Destination Course.
5. In the window that opens, click the search button to pull up all of your courses.
6. Click select next to the correct course that you want to copy the content into
7. Under step 2, Select Course Materials, click the checkbox next to each item you want to copy (select all if you aren’t sure)
8. If you are copying a course that used a Publisher course cartridge, make sure to select the Course Cartridge Materials check box in Step 4.
9. Click submit. You’ll be told you will be sent an email when the process is completed.
10. When you receive the completed email, the content has been copied into the new shell and you may begin editing as needed.

Blackboard Export/Import (you may have already performed steps 1-8 if you backed up the course previously.)

Export from a Blackboard shell

1. Go into the course that needs to be exported
2. Click on the Packages and Utilities in the Control Panel
3. Click Export/Archive course.
4. Click Export in the menu bar.
5. In Step 3 of the Export choose the areas you want to include in the export. If you aren’t sure, just check all the boxes to make sure you get everything. NOTE: If you are exporting assignments, tests or graded discussion boards you must select the Grade Center Columns and Settings option or these items will not be exported.
6. Click Submit. You are told an email will be sent when the process is complete. Click OK.
7. After you’ve received the email letting you know it has completed, return to the Export area. The export file is now listed; it is a .zip file.
8. Click the export file. An open or save as dialog box will appear. Click Save.
9. Navigate to where you want to save this file on your hard drive and save the file.

Import to a Blackboard shell

1. Go into the course where the new content is to be imported.
2. Click on Import Package/view logs in the Control Panel.
3. Click on Import Package on the menu bar.
4. Step 1 has the course code filled out for you.
5. In step 2, Select a Package, click the browse button to locate the zip you downloaded from the Export process.
6. In step 3, click the checkboxes for the pieces you want to upload into the new shell. NOTE: If you are importing assignments, tests or graded discussion boards you must select the Grade Center Columns and Settings option or these items will not be imported correctly.
7. Click submit. This can take some time depending on the file size. You will be sent an email confirmation when completed.
   Your course content has now been copied into the new shell. FYI, this will add to content already in the Blackboard shell. It will not delete anything already added to the course. Once the import has completed, you may edit as needed.

Student Access

Course shells area created in an unavailable state. This means they are unavailable to students, not the instructor. In order for students to access your course you must make the course available.

How to:

1. Go to the Customization area in the Control Panel
2. Click on Properties
3. Under step 3, Course Availability, Set this to Yes
4. Click submit

If you do not want students to access the course at this time, leave the availability set to no. This will leave the course on the student’s portal, so they know they are in the class. But it will let them know it is currently unavailable. You’ll need to remember to make it available when you are ready for them to access the course.

We have a PeopleSoft manual for faculty that includes instructions for utilizing the new roster as well as many other tasks in PeopleSoft; the complete manual can be found at the following link:  http://unity.kctcs.edu/docushare/dsweb/View/Collection-16430.

In addition to the manual, we developed an online tutorial/video, too.  The tutorial can be found at the following link: http://unity.kctcs.edu/docushare/dsweb/View/Collection-17162.

This activity works best in a composition class that is currently engaged in working with narrative writing styles.  I personally use it for segments on literacy and personal narratives.

Materials

• You will need an image or a set of images.  These can be presented to students via an overhead projector or hardcopy, but I find the practice to be more successful when students can hold and pass around a picture.  Not all students need to be working with the same image, but having several students per image is useful; students will be able to compare their own descriptions to those of others.  Images that have detailed content work best.  (A good source for me in the past has always been photographs from National Geographic.)
• An overhead projector
• Examples of ekphrasis to serve as models

Guidelines and Purpose

One of the difficulties that students in my composition classes often face when engaging narrative writing tasks is the necessary scope of descriptive details.  A common approach is to provide models of the narrative for students; however, I find that the models are more useful if they are paired with specific descriptive writing practice.  Therefore, this exercise uses a genre of writing that students have often not encountered to improve their approach to descriptive writing: ekphrasis.

Since the purpose of ekphrasis is to recreate an image via language, the genre pairs well writing styles or tasks that require close attention to descriptive detail.   A secondary purpose of ekphrasis requires writers to allude to what they see as the essence behind the image.  If more class time is available, this route can be pursued to address writing descriptive passages to elicit specific meanings or interpretations.

The Steps in Brief:

• Provide a history of the genre and examples.  (See references below for source material.)  You can have images or slides on the overhead projector while you read examples in order to provide an immediate image reference. (See example slide below.)

• Give students the opportunity to comment on how accurate they perceive the ekphrasis examples to be.  Ask them to comment on diction, style, and structure, and invite any additional comments.
• Divide students into pairs or have them work individually.
• Give each student or pair an image.  Ask them to model ekphrasis and describe the image.  (200 words is my recommended passage length.  This often takes 20-40 minutes to complete.)
• Once the passages are complete, have them exchange the written descriptions with other students.  Reveal the pictures after reading passages.  Give students an few minutes to chat and discuss their successes and difficulties with the task.  (This will usually happen anyway while they are touring the writing output.)
• Discuss with students how this might be applied to the narrative assignments from the course.  Recommend that they modify the technique in the following way: visualize scenes from your narrative in your mind before writing them and utilize some of the ekphrastic techniques to improve the visual components of your work.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this lesson seems to delight many students.  Some will become frustrated at being asked to describe an image they may see as boring or uneventful.  (Your image selection can influence this, of course.)  However, with a little encouragement, nearly all the students in my 101 and 102 composition classes have completed successful ekphrastic descriptions.  I often collect these online in a central location to allow access while students are drafting narratives; they will frequently use them as models.

Perhaps the largest challenge with this assignment stems from literary culture; the ekphrasis, in the most traditional forms, does not appear that often in contemporary society.  Most of the standard examples are from the nineteenth century and earlier, and as a result emphasizing relevance can be difficult.  I will often conclude class with a discussion about how the genre might have changed or where students might see similar styles today.  If time is available, instructors might also consider discussing links to travel narratives, tourism advertisements, information panels in museums, and modern reviews of video games and films.

Some Suggested Sources

Popular examples: (Early) Plato’s forms, the description of the shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, engravings on the Temple of Juno in Virgil’s Aeneid, (More recent) “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, John Ruskin’s description of J.M.W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On, and William Thackeray’s ekphrasis of the same painting.

Scholarly Treatments:  Though many of these exist, two that are readily available on the web and suitable for this exercise are:

1.)    Ryan Welsh’s approach to defining the genre: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/ekphrasis.htm

2.)    Marjorie Munsterberg’s detailed essay with many of the examples suggested above:

http://www.writingaboutart.org/pages/ekphrasis.html

A printable version of this assignment / notes is here.

The following is a variation of the email instructions we send to students to help them activate their accounts. It has screenshots of the new process, so you can get an idea of what the students need to do in order to set their passwords.

 A Couple of Things to Remember

1)       Students must be enrolled in a credit class to have email.  Students who are able to enroll (i.e. Term Activated) but are not enrolled in classes will have access to student self service (Peoplesoft) only.

2)      The personal email address must be what they entered on the application.  It is listed as a “Home” email address in Peoplesoft.

3)      After entering their birth month and day students must use two (SSN, EMPLID and/or Personal Email) to activate the account.  We are seeing several students trying to fill out all four options when activating their account.  It will not proceed to the next step if they do more than two.

4)      It takes up to two business days after a student enrolls in a credit class for the email account to become available.

5)      We encourage everyone to check and update their personal information in Peoplesoft and to add a personal email address if possible.  Students and employees can update this information in Peoplesoft under “Main Menu > Self Service > Personal Information > Personal Information Summary.”

Student Instructions (Printable Version)

Step One: Please go to the link http://jefferson.kctcs.edu/Current_Students/User_Account_Center

Step Two: Click on the link labeled “KCTCS User Account Center” to receive a screen that shows  the image on the left.

Step Three: Fill out the above page with your birth month and date and only two of the following three items

• Social Security Number (Number only—no dashes)
• Student ID Number
• Personal Email Address Personal Email Address (Your personal email address as you entered it when you applied to Jefferson)

Step Four: Click on “Create / Update My User Profile.” On the next page, you will be shown your username and email information, along with your student ID number. Please note the student ID number if you do not already know it.

Step Five: Click on the link in the lower right hand corner labeled “Set My Password.”  Then, the next page will appear like the image on the left.

Step Six: Enter your last name and KCTCS student ID number. Make sure to enter your last name exactly as it appears in Peoplesoft, including any suffix without punctuation. Then click on “Sign In.”

Step Seven: Follow the on screen instructions (pictured below) to reset your password.

When, this step has been completed successfully, you will receive the following screen:

Step Eight: At this point, you should be able to log into student self service and email, etc. Please be sure to use your username and not the email address (username@kctcs.edu) when logging in.

Step Nine: Please go to the site https://pwreset.kctcs.edu and set up your security questions.

Please note: Students can update home address, phone number and personal email address at any time in Peoplesoft under “Main Menu > Self Service > Personal Information > Personal Information Summary.”

For financial aid purposes, we must record students who are “no shows” to class at the end of the day August 25.

As you know, your cooperation in this process helps ensure that the college dos not disburse financial aid to students for any classes they do not attend.    A no show is a student who never attends your class before the cut off-date.  If a student attended even once and then did not return, she or he is NOT a no show. All rosters, regardless of location or type of course, (corrections, dual credit, on-line, etc.) must be evaluated for no shows.

• On August 26, please go into the Faculty Center to the No Show tab and mark your “no shows” for each class.  (Instructions are given once you click the no show tab.)

• If you do not have any no shows, mark the box at the top that indicates that the roster has been checked for no shows.  (I am not sure if you also have to check the box if you have marked no shows on your roster, but please do so just in case. )
• Do not do this before August 26, since there is no way to undo a no show and we want to be sure the student will not have attended (or contacted you with a legitimate excuse for not attending) through August 25.

Please remember as well that you may not bar a student from your class if the student has paid to attend it, even if that student comes to class three weeks into the semester.  You can encourage him or her to drop if that is best, but you may not withdraw a student or bar him or her from your class. In late August we will purge all students who have not paid; you will be notified when that happens so you can view your updated rosters.  At that point you should not let any student remain in your class who no longer appears on the roster.

What follows is a description of an oral-derived, multiple-source exercise I have recently given in an English 101 class that students seem to enjoy.  Its purpose is to de-mystify the process of writing coherently and with unity from multiple sources.  I’d love to hear any ideas you have on improvement and utilization.

I start by suggesting to them that we have been doing this very thing in speech most of our lives—likely starting with toddlerhood—and by now are quire expert at combining oral-derived sources  to produce response or thesis-based, fluid, fluent narratives, virtually without apparent, conscious thought or even much effort.    Any number of examples should suffice to test the “theory.”  In this case, I like hypothetical scenarios form early life.  I suggest one such case: a pre-K or Kindergarten student reporting at the dinner table on an event that happened in class that day.   It has a topic (“Johnny”), a thesis (“he got into trouble”), supporting detail (“let me tell you how he did it”) and even a conclusion (“I’m never going to do that in class”).  And of course, it contains the essential ingredients of source-based writing: summary, paraphrase, quotation and synthesis.  Not only has she entertained and enlightened her family with the kind of masterful presentation she is already so good at she doesn’t need to rehearse, she has done so without even cracking The Penguin Handbook, much less downloading something far less colorful from the web.

Here’s the recipe:

Ask students to form groups of 3 in a circle with their desks, so as to be able to converse face to face.  Explain that there are to be among each group three 2-way conversations, one after the other, on the same topic, in each case with the non-speaking students taking notes.  The conversation could be on almost anything, but of course if it’s class or reading-based, that’s two birds, one stone.  (My next try at this will be a discussion of their responses to a story character’s choices.)  Before they start, each is to have on hand a pen, and a sheet of notebook paper divided into three equally sized columns, denoted by two parallel, vertical lines, top to bottom.  At the top of the left-hand column should appear the name of the peer to the left in the circle, at the top of the right-hand column the name of the peer to the right, and at the top of the middle column the name of the note-taker/author.  The idea of course is for each note-taker to end up with brief notations, preferably with a few choice quotes (words and phrases being fine) on the tenor of the conversation—ghost notes really–including their own fleeting responses to the conversation, recorded in the middle column.  At the end of the session each student has notes on one specific conversation.

The next step is for each student to write up a thesis-based account of the conversation, following the general principles of research-based writing, including introducing sources/authors, introducing quotations and commenting on them, integrating sources (ideas/responses from all 3 participants—the author is a source), providing in-text citations, and unifying the language.  Sound reasonable?  But is it?  Field-testing is barely underway.  Stay tuned.  Please let me know your ideas—and if you try it, your luck.

Printable Version of this Article

In the Spring 2011 semester, I adapted my Digital Scrapbook Assignment for my HUM120: Introduction to Western Humanities course. For Unit 4 (the Baroque Period), I gave them a choice to write a traditional essay or to create a Digital Scrapbook. Many chose the digital scrapbook option.

Description of Assignment:

Create a digital scrapbook of a Baroque Composer. Find ten or more websites (or other sources) on your topic, and look for information you feel is important to share with your classmates so that they get a better understanding of your topic. This information is a “tidbit” that you will put in a scrapbook about your topic.

You may copy and paste text, pictures, audio, backgrounds, clip art, poetry, songs, video, or just about anything that pertains to your subject. Do not copy paragraphs of texts, just the information that “wows” you.

You must give credit to the author/ creator of the material by using quotation marks and citing the sources in a MLA Works Cited page (the last page of your scrapbook).

Guidelines for an “A” ScrapBook

• The scrapbook has 20 or more different but related items (text, pictures, audio, clips, etc.) that cover the topic in detail.
•  The layout of the scrapbook is appealing and well organized; the use of color and text add interest and appeal. The design is easy to read and follow. There is consistency in alignment and colors.
• The scrapbook uses a wide variety of media and genres (text, poetry, quotes, maps, audio, video) to explore the topic.
• The source information is included for all graphics, facts, quotes, media inputs. All information is documented in MLA format.
• The scrapbook follows the guidelines to creating a PPT presentation (and if not using PPT, still applies the same concepts).
• There are no misspelling, mechanical, or grammatical errors

You can view these presentations at the links below.

• Cassidy Martin on Antonio Vivaldi*
• Brad Mattingly on Mozart
• Fallyn Hildebrand on Bach
• Rhonda Hilligoss on Bach
• Mike Shoopman on Bach
• Mahealani Palepale on Bach
• Brittney Metzmeier on Bach
• Katie White on Vivaldi
• Breeana Brandt on Vivaldi
• Sara Bauer on Johann Friedrich Fasch
• Kara Johnson on Vivaldi
• Kimberly Riordan on Handel

*This presentation is hosted outside of my control, so I do not know if it will remain up or how long the link will work.