3rd time's a charm—Communication class sells their inventions yet again!

Once again, Communication class students took over assembly this last Friday to present their inventions they created and to sell them to TAPA students! If you missed them, take a look at them here:

Jass	Judy
Joyce	Antoine
Jason Y.

If you haven't had the chance to vote for the students yet, there's still time! Go for it!

Future SA officers face the fear with Assembly campaign speeches

Today. at Assembly, students who've declared an interest in running for next year's Student Association (SA) presented persuasive speeches, imploring their peers to vote for them. I'm proud to have taught 5 of 6 of them in my past Communications classes, and they did me proud! Here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

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President	Jessica C.
Executive VP	Rachel
Social VP	Robert	Betty
Treasurer	Jessica L.
Comm Director	Antoine

Take a side and persuade me you're right!

Originally posted 11/30/11.

Which of these persuasive speech topics interests you? Today for class,

Pick	3	of the following topics
Write	x2	paragraphs (1 for, 1 against) for each
Total of	6	paragraphs.

Post the six paragraphs to your blog.

Posted with Blogsy

About those Communications Invention speeches... Who won?

I never had the chance to announce the winners of your votes for the best Communication speeches done for assembly a few weeks ago. The results:

• Which presentation was the best? Belteshazzar (Jessica L.)
  
• Which speech was the most persuasive? Profunacklace (Jessica G.)
  
• Which product would you most want to purchase? iBowlholder (James)
  

Congrats to all the speakers for excellent jobs!

More Communication class inventions, please!

Once again, Communication class students took over assembly this last Friday to present their inventions they created and to sell them to TAPA students! If you missed them, take a look at them here:

Jessica L.	Gabriella
James (Part 1)	James (Part 2)
Lillian	Jessica G.

If you haven't had the chance to vote for the students yet, there's still time! Go for it!

"You know what they outta invent?" Persuade us to invest in your creation!

Originally posted 3/20/12.



Vince, the pitchman for such amazing products as the SlapChop and ShamWow, is quite the marketing genius. He takes simple products and pitches them in such a way that you feel stupid not buying them. I mean, I actually bought one of these SlapChops (admittedly, from IKEA, not from Vince, but still) because once he puts the idea in your head... it's stuck.

I could have been a millonaire.

When I was little, I used to want to be an inventor. I thought it would be so cool to come up with an idea for a simple product, put them together, and sell them to make a million dollars. I had the opportunity to try it in college with my awesome Nose Muff idea that I told you about in class, but not only was my idea not accepted, but it looks like someone beat me to the punch.

Well, for your Persuasive speech, you'll be doing what I once attempted: inventing a product and selling it to us, your audience. This speech will incorporate a little bit of the Demonstration speech skills you should have acquired, but your focus should be less on how to use the product and more on why we should buy this product. Next class, we'll be doing an auction over the junk that I showed you today in class. If you need a reminder of what I'll be "selling," take a look here:



After picking out your items, you'll put them together, build a mock product, create an advertisement, and write up an outline. The final project will be be pitching your product to the entire school at our assembly on November 2nd, so you've got to come up with the greatest invention idea ever! So be ready for Thursday's auction!

Why you stink at arguing: studying rhetorical fallacies to improve your persuasion skills

Originally posted 11/21/11.

Do you regularly get pwnd by your teacher or friends because you lack the basic persuasion and/or debate skills necessary for your success? In class today, I went over the following presentation:

Logical Fallacies on Prezi

As I said at the end of the presentation, you have one assignment: Go to  and find 3 videos that exemplify one fallacy from each of each of the categories of rhetorical fallacies

• Emotional fallacies [pathos]
• Ethical fallacies [ethos]
• Logical fallacies [logos]

Embed (not link to) each example into a blog post with 1¶ (each) explaining why it is an example of that fallacy.

Ok, so there's that! Good luck!

Future SA officers face the fear with Assembly campaign speeches

Today. at Assembly, students who've declared an interest in running for next year's Student Association (SA) presented persuasive speeches, imploring their peers to vote for them. I'm proud to have taught 5 of 8 of them in my past two Communications classes, and they did me proud! Here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

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President	Gabriel
Executive VP	Belle	WinWin
Social VP	Angela
Comm Director	Emily	Steven
Secretary	Betty	Annika

Who did the best invention speeches?

My Communication class has been begging for the results of their extra credit Exit poll, so here they are.

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Best speeches yet? Communication class sells some crazy inventions.

It's late, so I'm not going to do a huge writeup over this, but today, Communication class students did speeches over their Inventions they've created. Here they are, for your viewing pleasure.

Betty V.	Rachel
Krikki	Angela
Jessica	Mandy
Janelle	Tiffany
Tristan

Vote for me, or DIE: Fallacies + Persuasion speeches

Originally posted 11/21/11.

A few days ago, I started the following presentation:



Your first assignment was the 3  videos—one for each category of rhetorical fallacy we studied.

Shoutout to Janelle for a great/terrible example
of a slippery slope!

The second assignment is to write a 5-7¶ "campaign speech" (following the typical outline). You are running for SA president against a speech class classmate using as many rhetorical fallacies as possible. You are writing this in a paragraph style (as opposed to an outline) because, as you are using rhetorical fallacies, you will  highlight and label  what fallacies they are.

By next Monday, you should have the 5-7¶s uploaded to your blog. During class, you will present your speech to the rest of the class. I will give extra points to

1. whomever I feel is the most convincing, and
2. who correctly uses and identifies the most rhetorical fallacies

This should be the worst speech you do all semester, so get out all your terrible-ness!

What is all this KONY business?

A couple of bad, bad men.

Communications class has been talking recently about rhetoric, the art of persuasion, leading me to think of examples of persuasion around us. Nothing online is as hot right now as the Stop Joseph Kony video online. Hopefully, you've watched it one of the 200,000 times it's been posted on —if not, take a peek.



In class, we've been talking about this video, and one of the things that keeps coming up is the controversy surrounding what Invisible Children, the Kony project's parent organization, is all about. One of my favorite websites, GOOD, has an interesting interview with Jedidiah Jenkins, one of the people involved in the campaign. I'd suggest you read this interview, but if not, here's some highlights I thought were worth you checking out:

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GOOD: What was the origin of the now-world-famous Kony video?

JEDIDIAH JENKINS: We’ve made 10 documentaries before this one, and we’ve toured them around high schools and colleges since 2006. We’ve built a groundswell of grassroots support through our other films. But the reality is we would work so hard, and make all these videos, and pour so much effort into them, and they would get 3,000 views. But then a video with a cat flushing a toilet gets 40 million views. That left us going, "What are we doing wrong?" And one day, one of our colleagues said, "Man, this would be so much easier of we could make Joseph Kony famous and get people to actually know who he is. We wouldn’t have to fight so hard to get attention on these issues in Uganda." That was the inspiration. After that, our goal was to make a movie you could watch online, that’s entertaining, and that tells the story in a digestible way. And we had no idea how hungry the global audience was for that.

GOOD: A lot of people are wondering what you expect this video to accomplish. What’s the best endgame as far as Invisible Children is concerned?

JENKINS: Our hope is we see an effective end to the LRA. Ideally, beyond all things, we’d like to see Kony’s arrest or his surrender—and not just his arrest; we also want the other leadership of the LRA. But understanding that he is a madman, we understand that it could end violently. Luckily, the United States is involved, and they’re using a great team to try and mitigate violence as much as possible. If Kony is arrested, we’d like to see Kony tried at the Hague, and then it sets a precedent. It tells future warlords that if you want to commit genocide, if you want to commit war crimes, you cannot get away with it anymore.

GOOD: What do you want to tell the film's critics directly?

JENKINS: Our films are made for high school children. We make films that speak the language of kids. We say, "You may live thousands of miles away from these problems in Uganda, but those kids are just like you, and you can do something to help them by getting your government and your self involved." Our films weren’t made to be scrutinized by theGuardian. They were made to get young people involved in some of the world’s worst crimes. We can’t solve every crime, and we don’t intend to. But we can help fight the worst crimes.

The worst speeches of the year: Running for SA president while using rhetorical fallacies

Previously, Communication class spent some time studying rhetorical fallacies, or unfair arguments commonly made when someone is trying to persuade someone else. After learning to identify them, the students wrote speeches announcing their candidacy for SA president. The twist: they had to use as many logical fallacies as they could (and identify them) in making those arguments. Here's a peek at what went down in class.


If I may plug a class, honestly, not only for Freshmen or Sophomores—Communication is the most valuable class that I teach, and I truly wish that it was a requirement for every student in the school. Consider it for a class option next semester!