Teaching and Critical Pedagogy

ENG 480
Social Justice & the Teaching of Literature in
Secondary Schools

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“NICENET Portfolio

I. Overview:

The goal is to use an interactive computer conference to add a rich discussion forum to our course. During the semester, you will be required to post responses to questions/student responses on our NICENET conference board weekly.

Your entries should be thoughtful and respond to the ideas of other students. Reading student entries and responding to others is as important as entering your own responses.

Previous experience indicates this requires a regular time commitment of at least 30 minutes per week.

II. Assessment:

Assessment will work this way: you will be required to print off your responses/on line conversations that you have during the semester. You will submit these responses in a THREE-RING BINDER: a portfolio reflecting your work for the semester. You should organize your responses in SEQUENTIAL ORDER, from the first entry to the last. And, you must have HEADER INFORMATION i.e. the question, its posting date, the date you responded, etc. Failing to do any of these things will affect your grade.

I have provided a rubric at the bottom of the page to give you a better idea of what I will be looking for when I assess your NICENET responses.

NOTE: It is important to start early and keep up with the conference. It is assumed that you will respond to all of the questions, and that you will keep up with the conference each week. By "week," I expect students to respond to posted questions between 7 - 8 days of their original posting date. Certainly, you can respond as much as you want, but at the very least you are expected to answer the posted questions on a week-to-week basis.

Ultimately, your grade will be greatly affected should you choose to wait until the last day/weeks to respond and/or participate in the conference. Moreover, your grade will also be greatly affected if you choose to respond to just a few of the questions. In the end, you will be assessed on active and critical participation in the forum for the entire semester. You will be expected to respond to each question, and expected to enter into exchanges with other participants.

To be clear: the questions on this forum are NOT to be considered a series of "short answer essay questions" that you can do at any time. The posted questions directly relate to weekly classroom discussions. Therefore, routinely answering questions late and/or skipping the forum altogether helps little when it comes to this class or to advancing the critical discourse necessary to making this course successful.

Use professional manners, while being informal at the same time. Don't "flame" other people's responses -- it is often a good idea to reread an entire item before reacting too quickly to an upsetting comment from another student.

Be mindful of how this electronic conference format extends our discussions because you may want to consider on-line communities for your own teaching using an on-line resource such as Nicenet.org.

Created by: allen.webb@wmich.edu
Revised Date: 4/15/05

III. How to Do it:

STEP 1 : GET REGISTERED (You will only do this step the first time you join the class.)

• Open up the Internet
• Type in www.nicenet.org.
• On the right under New Users Start Here click Join a Class under Students
• You will be asked to enter the CLASS KEY in the box. The CLASS KEY for your class is: ____________________________________. The class is named SCHOOL & SOCIETY.
• A new page will open for you to create a username & password. (Suggestion: Use the same username and password you use to log into the system at school. It might make it easier for you to remember.)
• YOU MUST FILL IN YOUR REAL FIRST & LAST NAME under the Optional Field so that I know who you are. Then click the JOIN THE CLASS button at the bottom of the page.
• Another page will open indicating whether your user name has been accepted. If it has not, it's because someone else has the same username. If that's the case, create a new username and try it again.
• Once a username has been accepted it will tell you to write it down. Then click the Finish Registration button near the bottom of the page.

STEP 2: LOG INTO ICA (This is how you log in once you have joined the class.)

• Type in the Username & Password you created in the steps above. Now you are logged into the class discussion forum.
• All topics will be posted under the CONFERENCINGsection.
• Click View Topics to look at the questions/topics your instructor has posted. You will also be able to read other peoples' replies to the topics allowing you to respond to correspond with them.
• When you are ready to respond, click REPLY . A new window will open for you to write your posting. When you finish your message, click POST NEW MESSAGE.
• Then select your posting with the mouse and then print "selection" in the print menu. Make sure that the header is highlighted, i.e. your name, date and time of your posting. KEEP ALL PRINTED HARD COPIES! I will only be grading the hard copies in your portfolio.
• When you are finished, click the LOGOUT button at the bottom of the page when you are done.

"NICENET" Portfolio Rubric

An "A" grade for your "NICENET” Portfolio requires that the student meets/exceeds the expectations based in part on the following criteria:

• Participation in Discussions: Provides comments and new information in a regular manner; interacts with a variety of participants by responding and building upon others’ comments; it is quite evident that participant was involved in the on-line discussions weekly, and shows consistent signs of interacting with others.
• Content of Postings: Reveals a solid understanding of the topics as evidenced by thoughtful responses and questions; connections made with topics./ideas learned in class.
• Evidence of Critical Thinking : Offers critical analysis of existing posted ideas or introduces a different interpretation to an existing idea; clearly is able to integrate knowledge and apply to information learned in class in an elaborated way.

A "B" grade means that the student might meet the requirements, but still lacks in some of the more critical areas reflective of "A" quality work; a "C" grade likely meets some of the criteria/requirements, but leaves too many questions regarding postings, quality, critical thinking, analysis, etc.; a "D" grade likely reflects considerable problems and/or poor quality of work, postings, content, etc.

Again, it is assumed that you will be actively involved in the online discussion throughout the entire semester.

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