1. Learning Activity

For a learning activity, I would suggest that students make observable interaction with the video in the form of personal notes and to take the practice quiz on Khan Academy’s website which fits section 9.6.1.1 in “Teaching in a Digital Age” (Bates, 2019) which would help comprehension and be useful for studying.

As in our Interactive Learning Resource, I would also assign a writing assignment asking learners to use parallel structures in blog post format, encouraging students to use parallelism in a way that develops their writing style. If students interacted with each other’s posts, a higher level of interaction would be facilitated and could lead to better learning. For this particular assignment, a student-student interactive activity is harder to design for like in section 9.6.1.3 of “Teaching in a Digital Age” (Bates, 2019) , but simply reading and responding to classmate’s posts could expose learners to different applications of parallelism and different writing styles.

For these activities learners would need a laptop or smart mobile device (ie. phone, tablet, etc) and wifi/data connection, and a blog.

 

  1. Feedback

Automatic grading is provided for the Khan Academy quiz, giving immediate feedback in a behavioural style. This helps for review and studying, but does not help students learn how to incorporate parallelism into repertoire of literary devices. Feedback from student-student interaction through commenting on each other’s posts would be more constructive, exposing them to different writing styles.

To work towards more student-teacher dialogue like in section 9.6.1.2 of “Teaching in a Digital Age” (Bates, 2019), the teacher could also give feedback by grading and commenting on the blog post assignment. A pass/fail grade along with comments from the teacher would be most helpful for this assignment because the only requirement is that parallelism is used correctly. Commenting on the student’s writing and suggesting ways to better use parallelism stylistically would be the valuable portion of feedback resulting in more student-teacher interaction.

The only additional technology requirements would be email to provide private feedback.

 

  1. Worthwhile?

Since grading and commenting on the blog posts are the only portions that need grading, it would not be too much work and would be worthwhile. However if the lesson in parallelism was part of a larger English course, the value of this specific lesson would be lower. In that case, I think that encouraging more student-student interaction and only grading the short blog post as pass/fail would be more suitable. Then, more time and energy could be put towards valuable feedback and student-teacher interaction on a larger assignment, also making it easier to scale for a larger class.

 

  1. Inclusive Design

To make this video accessible I would notify students that Khan Academy has a transcript available on their website, and point out that subtitles are available. I would also also write a short lesson/description about parallelism in simple language. This would be helpful for learners who may find an exclusively audio-based means of representation inaccessible such as Deaf learners, English Language Learners, learners with devices that have poor audio quality, and colourblind learners (since colour coding is used to organize writing in the video).

Another barrier is the web-based platform. Since the video and blog platforms are all online, students need a laptop or smart mobile device and WiFi/data connection. If students do not have these resources, they could use computers at a public library or their University which are usually free to access.

 

– SC

 

References

Bates, A.W. (2019). 9.6 Interaction. Teaching in a Digital Age – Second Edition. B.C. Faculty Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/chapter/pedagogical-roles-for-text-audio-and-video/