What are you going to present? Check out these Demo topics, Comm students!

Today in class, I asked Communications students to look over the following list of Demonstration speech topics and pick 5 that they would be the most interested in presenting.

Select 5 possible speech ideas you'd be interested in presenting and blog them (one short paragraph each). Of the 5 you select, only three of them may be from my list here, so make your own ideas! Go.

Before you turn in the any essay...

It's been a little while since I've posted on this blog, mostly because:

1. I've been crazy busy with making assignments, working on my Masters, and grading all you work.
2. I've been posing a lot more to the shared Evernote Notebook. (Subscribe here!)
3. We've been hammering away at "standard" reading, assignments, and other homework that doesn't require too much extra explanation.
4. I've been so slammed with things that I haven't been able to "play" with tech stuff and show you how to use it.

Hopefully, I'll get back onto posting on here again soon. However, until then, I've got a resource that all students, especially essay-writing British Literature kids, ought to take a look at. Before turning in a paper to any teacher (notably, myself), I'd take a peek at the following list (available for you to download here) and make sure you check everything off the list.

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1. Find and destroy the following:
• intensifiers / de-intensifiers (e.g really, pretty, maybe, mostly, nearly, barely)
• blah words (e.g good, bad) 
2. Check all your verbs:

• Are they all present? All past? 
• Are there any be verbs (i.e. am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being)? Kill as many as you can. 
• Did you write active sentences? Were passive sentences written by you? 
3. Recheck for sloppy errors:

• Are there any "red squiggly" errors? (e.g. teh, Mr. Web, alot) 
• Is the formatting up to the teacher's standards? (e.g. margins, font size/type, tabs, title, bibliography) 
• Did you reread your essay OUT LOUD? 
4. Take the "Ahhhhh" test:

• Is your reader going to be smarter/better-informed after reading this? 
• How long is your teacher going to say "Ahhhhh" after reading it? 

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I can't guarantee that going through every question will automatically earn you an A, but I can guarantee you that it'll help quite a bit. Take note!

English II Whiteboard pop quiz

English II students are the first to do an in-class blogpost / pop quiz for me. Their 5 simple questions all came from in-class discussion, reading, and from stuff easily available on my Evernote Notes for Students notebook.

1. Normalizing—definition in your words + example from something we've read
2. Explain the 3 places something can go wrong when you communicate. (HINT: Shannon-Weaver)
3. Explain Hemingway's Iceberg Principle.
4. Suspension of disbelief—definition in your words + example
5. A) What do you think the metamorphosis was in The Metamorphosis? B) Why?

Extreme focus during a quiz

 

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