My current mission for the online class about teaching online that I’m taking this summer is to do a whole bunch of Googling for existing resources and tools that I can use to expand my teaching materials. Swell. The problem I’m having, as I more or less expected I would, is that I’m not finding a lot out there. There are a ton of resources aimed at K-12 instruction of the stuff I teach, and some of it looks interesting, but most of it is fairly elementary.

The other big problem is that the materials don’t necessarily teach things up to my standard. Not to sound all pretentious, but the Youtube videos about ethos, logos, and pathos are pretty dreadful (unless I’m missing something), and almost none of them address kairos, which I also think is important. Logical fallacies, another important subject, is similarly taught in vastly different ways, and none of them cover the breadth of material I want in the way that I want. This video about paragraph structure is pretty good, but it’s really more about topic sentences than the whole paragraph. So, I use it, but it’s not ideal. In many cases, therefore, I will need to build it myself. In addition, in some of these cases, I just happen to really like my current approach. I teach fallacies by having students develop definitions and provide samples, and then discuss online–all of which works way better than having them watch a video or listen to me talk.

I did recently find Kahoot while looking for quiz tools that would be easier to work with than what’s built into Blackboard. It’s a tool really designed for in-class use, and generally aimed at K-12 educators, but unlike a lot of similar apps, it’s free (entirely so at present) and not limited to a number of seats. I think it will be great for my use with my in-person classes. I asked a teenager recently if she’d heard of it, and she said she loved using it in school. Weird. I’m going to use it for review of some things we’ve done this summer and see how that goes.

I’d like to find a good video for teaching about the Toulmin approach to argumentation, but what I’ve found is often overly long and detailed. For example, it’s common for videos to talk about the history of this model and the dude who invented/defined it. And really–who cares? I don’t even care if they know the name of it; why would I waste their time on that? Many videos also go into more detail than I do. And others are…excessively casual. I have also tried regular Google (rather than just video), and have concluded that my simplified approach to Toulmin is something I just have to build a video (or Prezi or screencast or whatever) for myself. I don’t think it benefits my students to go into Stephen Toulmin’s full-blown process in detail. They will surely forget it as soon as they’ve learned it, and be confused in the process.

At the same time, I’m pretty excited about the tools identified in two pages about storytelling online. I think they represent more of an opportunity for me as a writer than as a teacher, but it did encourage me to check into adding audio to Word files, which is something I’ve realized could be helpful. There are times when the video alone isn’t optimal, and the doc alone is too bare-bones. Offering both a video and an audio-annotated doc will sometimes be optimal, I believe. The process looks fairly straightforward, so I’ll have to play with it. I will just add that date-limiting searches when seeking technology solutions is essential, in order to avoid hopelessly outdated information. I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of that lately, and it’s a huge time saver.