Thoughts on Our Final Project

These are just some random thoughts about our final project. I'll be happy with whatever we decide as a group, whether it incorporates any of my ideas or not.

If we stick with the handbook idea, we need to nail down who the audience is--teachers or students? If it is teachers, what level are they teaching?  If students, what grade? I'd rather a handbook for educators than a handbook for students. That might be more easily published through Dr. Zamora's contacts, not sure. Also, I don't personally have any interest in making a print book, but certainly any online resource would have printable pages. That might satisfy the urge for paper.


If it were up to me, I'd prefer to make a different online resource rather than a handbook. I'd love to make an online compilation of best practices instead of a general handbook. For example, I use  rubrics for evaluation. So I could reference the theories about feedback and evaluation, and then demonstrate the rubrics. Or something with grammar; it's just a thought. In her last post, Laura mentioned that she uses lessons about general revision and self-revision in her classroom. I'd love to hear more about that. I know Tobey uses some innovative techniques in her class as well. For those of us in the group who aren't teaching yet, we could talk about classroom practices that we participated in as students, not teachers, that were particularly effective, and link some of the theories we are learning to the practices we experienced.

Another interesting project could be an online writing course.  Since we are talking so much about "Composition and Rhetoric" and "College Composition" in this class, we could create a syllabus and online site for a college level writing course and each create some lessons or units. (There are 11 of us--we could have 11 weeks in the course. We could add 1 week of library work, one week of conferences, and one week of presentations, if we wanted to stay true to the 15 week semester.)

Those are just some ideas I wanted to run up the flagpole. I will work gladly on whatever project the group decides.