Lesson Plans and Tools
For students who may not be familiar with either digital annotations or close reading, it will be helpful to introduce them via low-stakes collaborative work. This lesson plan would be suitable for a freshman writing seminar.
Skill(s):
Design; Deep readingTool(s):
Adobe Illustrator; BookBeetle Printing PressIn this program, the group has set-up an in-class learning session focused on learning the vocabulary and basic operations of a letterpress (also known as "common") press. By interacting with a vocabulary list, a thorough step-by-step set of instructions, and a labeled printing press, participants will brief window into the technologies that have helped to disseminate information for centuries.
Shortly to follow, the group will put a lesson plan focused on how to create wood block designs in Adobe Illustrator for use either as stamps or in combination with the press.
Shortly to follow, the group will put a lesson plan focused on how to create wood block designs in Adobe Illustrator for use either as stamps or in combination with the press.
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Poetry offers many challenges for students, from parsing meaning to understanding structure and beyond. Over the course of a full semester, or perhaps a unit on poetry, this lesson plan teaches students to break poetry down into its components, guide their classmates through difficult poems, and move beyond the literal words on the page towards holistic meaning. This lesson plan is most suitable for a course which returns frequently to difficult and intriguing poems throughout the semester.
Exhibit.so is an online platform that creates interactive digital collections. Students can scroll through online exhibits of objects (images/details of images, screenshots of texts, 3d images) that have been arranged in a certain order alongside text that glosses or tells a story about the objects in the exhibit. exhibit.so can be used for a traditional museum style exhibition, with a sequence of objects and descriptions, a close reading of a single object (as in the NYT close readings feature), or a close reading of a literary text paired with images and artifacts (as in this Dore/Coleridge exploration on BC’s student-led Deep Readings site).
This lesson is focused on how to use historical maps to encourage a deeper understanding of novels. The lesson's data set is drawn from Wilkie Collins’ novel Armadale, which takes place predominately in the United Kingdom, but the text spans the Atlantic between 1864-1866. Neither the students nor the professor need to be familiar with the novel for the lesson to be effective! The goal is to familiarize the students with ArcGIS and to walk them through what mapping the locations of a novel looks like.
Skill(s):
Deep readingTool(s):
https://www.craiyon.com/ (Generates AI art)Many students find it difficult to understand the nuances of poetry and poetics in comparison to prose or drama. In some cases the literal meaning of the poem may elude students entirely, or the subtlety of the images that the poetry evokes may be lost. This technology helps solve two problems: the teaching of 1) paraphrase, and 2) the use of visual imagery in poetry, because in generating images using AI tools, students will have to learn and practice paraphrase. New software has become available that can now make visual the language of poems. For students who are more visually inclined, or students who struggle with abstract metaphors or figurative language, these AI art generators can prove very useful as well as entertaining and engaging. Additionally, the images created by AI will necessarily be limited by ‘pinning down’ a specific image–the visualization will open up discussion in two ways: 1) exploring the implications of a specific concrete image in a poem, and 2) discussing the limitations of the images created, and what more the poem might suggest.