Blog-based Activity Example for MADE

From "HowToGeek.com"

I consulted a couple teachers and looked at a couple examples for this. I remember seeing a great blog assignment from Greg McCandless, who asked for some of us to comment back to his students’ posts and work; it was structured much like our initial assignment in this class, with students making individual posts on their own journals, and commenting at each other in response. Making the public available to your students and your students available to the public gives them additional points of view that you can’t offer.

Using Patrick Lemon’s upcoming Spring at Sage Seminar, “Build Your Own Computer,” I’m going to go through this activity in a purely hypothetical way, as I’m only supporting the seminar. It seems that a blog activity would be beneficial for a class like this, where the students might not know each other intimately or have any idea of their goals for the class (if any).

Though all students are participating in the seminar to build your own computer, all users have different expectations of their tools, particularly one as versatile as a computer. 

So to start off the class, it would be great to have a blogging activity where students introduce themselves and the things they’re looking for out of their computer. 

Some general categories might be:

• Productivity - Word processing, calendaring
• Graphics Editing
• Web Publishing
• Coding or Programming
• Gaming, which could be separated into various types that dictate graphic needs

After this activity we could then shake the students out into different smaller groups that have similar goals. 

These groups could continue blogging daily about what they’re needing to learn and do to meet the unique purpose(s) of their personalized computer. 

As part of the introductory lesson, the students could provide a video walk thru of the some of their common computer tasks using screen casting, showing some of the tasks, programs, and games they most like to use. Our students could also learn more about what they could be doing from their classmates with this multimedia activity. 

The Johnson Family Library Blog

This semester the Director of Library is joining a number of faculty and staff who are participating in the Dean of Academic Technology's MADE course, a professional development course that dives down deep into the opportunities and features of our Learning Management System, Canvas by Instructure. Introductory modules go over using threaded discussion posts and blogs, and both features can be utilized as assignments for grades in Canvas.

We are utilizing this blog in the hope that it will be a more robust feature to promote our "libraryatsage," and all the things we're doing there. In the future we hope to expand to more diverse and media-focused platforms like Tumblr, and maybe even video, as there are exciting advancements in that field. Stay tuned while we plan for better and more engaging information literacy lesson plans and designs.

This summer we also welcome our new Library Coordinator, Miss Wahl, who joins us from Nashville Public Library system, and Michigan public libraries before that. She loves engaging programming and we are lucky to have her. Visit the lower library to say hello to Miss Wahl welcome her to the community!