The East Campus Library and the East and Winter Park English departments have collaborated to create an E-Textbook for students and faculty using the LibGuides platform. This project is part of the ongoing college goal to reduce costs to students and increase access to course materials. If you are interested in finding out more about […]
Posts Categorized: English Composition
Weird Al Yankovic – Word Crimes
Special thanks to Deidre Holmes DuBois for sharing this link to Weird Al’s new music video on Word Crimes. Talk about a way to spark conversation about good grammar.
Critical Thinking and Civil Debate for Ordinary Life (and Ethics, btw)
This lesson is about how basic critical thinking works, and how important it is when discussing issues that are controversial or personal or are otherwise disposed to unnecessarily heated discussions. I will begin by showing that techniques exist for this, both for regulating emotions and then for proceeding in a rational way regardless of how […]
How to Kick Ass with Words
Without a doubt, fight scenes are a necessity of fiction. Even the most celebrated “literary” fiction writers include aggressive confrontations. Authors like Flannery O’Connor and Tobias Wolfe recognized the importance of violence in writing about humanity. It would be a bald-faced lie to claim that in our Friday night entertainment we don’t yearn for it. […]
It’s an Infographic Syllabus!
Click the picture above to examine this more closely. It’s an infographic syllabus for an online Comp II class. All the necessary information is included for college requirements. The only thing missing? About ten pages of drollness. This is created using Piktochart, a free infographic-creation software using cloud technology.
How to Improve English Reading Skills
Usually, students, and especially ESL students, find reading boring and, therefore, difficult. This blog discusses some of the problems with reading and shares some tips to help students to improve their reading skills. It discusses how reading can affect one’s grammar, writing, and vocabulary, and how it can help ESL students use English vocabulary […]
Google Car
Introductory Video Shoot a video introducing the topic and provide purpose of lesson. Create accounts with YouTube Capture and Amara.org. You Tube Capture allows sharing of video, and Amara allows captioning. Word 2013 will allow translation of text into multiple languages, so that it can be copied and pasted into Amara captioning. Introduction Google Inc. announced […]
Does Texting Hurt Your Grammar?
Thanks to Ashley Miller for this post: This article gives an overview of recent recent findings on how texting has affected students’ grammar, and what those findings suggest. The entire image of the infographic can be accessed in the article. I like the infographic because it presents detailed findings related to the article and presents […]
The world’s English mania – Jay Walker | TED-Ed
China is becoming the world largest English-speaking country. Is English becoming a mania around the world?Jay Walker explains why Chinese students drill the English language. The world’s English mania – Jay Walker | TED-Ed.
The power of passion – Richard St. John | TED-Ed
This video would be a great way to engage students in conversations about the broader topics of passion, success, love, and wealth, and the importance of each in their lives. These conversations could then be used as a springboard for a writing activity in which students reflect on what passion means to them- how its […]
It’s a Rap: English Lesson Music Videos Your Students Won’t Forget
Many of us grew up on “School House Rock”. How many of you can still remember the words to “Conjunction Junction”? Supplement your English class lesson plans with these fun music videos. To get to the whole collection just put in the search word “Flocabulary”. You will find many great videos on a variety of […]
What Aristotle and Joshua Bell can teach us about persuasion – Conor Neill | TED-Ed
What Aristotle and Joshua Bell can teach us about persuasion – Conor Neill | TED-Ed. In this Ted Ed lesson, the author uses elements of an experiment conducted by a famous violinist to examine Aristotle’s rhetorical means of Persuasion (Ethos, Logos, Pathos) and to illustrate the importance of all three reveals why all three are essential to audience […]
Magic, Harvard MOOC, and Macbeth
Harvard Extension Lecture on Macbeth You may enjoy the way Dr. Garber raises the bar of discussion about Macbeth in the above video. I enjoy it as a guide to set the tone for students, and I believe it could be used to bolster and enliven discussions online. I’m also including a video connecting Harry Potter to […]
100 Ways to Say “Said”
With special thanks to English professor Ashley Miller comes this infographic that illustrates multiple dialogue tags that students can use in place of “said” to indicate who is speaking. The list could serve as a quick and useful tip sheet to refer to when writing essays.
Yes Comma, No Comma
The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, always sparks a discussion among the teachers, and its rules are not well represented in the textbooks. That creates more confusion in the classroom. This poster makes some clarification when the Oxford comma can be omitted and why.