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ENGL 15: Creating a “Year in Review” Retrospective Podcast and Video

Activity Description

Dr. Peter Froehlich and Dr. Maggie Froehlich assign one podcast and one video in their four sections of English 15 taught at Hazleton.

The podcast is a podcast narrative highlighting a year in American history (post 1945) of the students choosing.  For the video, the students were put into groups by era (e.g. the early 1990s) to create a 10-minute video narrative based on their combined years.

About the Course Project

Course: ENGL 15 – Rhetoric and Composition
Instructor: Maggie Gordon Froehlich and Peter Alan Froehlich, Hazleton
Number of Students: 80+ students across four sections
Semester: Spring 2009
Duration of Assignment: 4 weeks for podcast and 5 weeks for video

Benefits

Students exposed to writing for new media. Students uploading podcasts to iTunes have a better sense of who the “audience” is in terms of writing.

“I think making a video for that for that final project that asked them to synthesize the material was actually a much better project than that straight-forward conventional essay had been [in previous semesters].” – Maggie Froehlich

Applications to Other Courses

Developing a podcast or video narrative a particular era or event could apply to courses in journalism, history, sociology and other social science courses.

 

Description for Students

Students are required to create five texts (two essays, one podcast, one webpage, and one video) and to revise them  based on feedback (from peers, from Learning Center consultants, and from me). 

Along with each assignment, students will create a weblog (“blog”) about their experiences in the class, including entries reflecting the process of research and writing that produced each text, and also discussions of what they found most interesting about or what they learned from the assignment. 

At the end of the semester, students will create an ePortfolio including introductory material and all of their assignments. 
Final examination:  The “Year in Review, redux” assignment is a cumulative project for the semester.  The ePortfolio serves as the “final exam” for the course; as  such, it is due (send the link to the instructor via e-mail) no later than 12 noon on the first day of final exam week.

Objectives

Course Objectives

  1. Learn to use the skills of rhetoric in communication consciously and deliberately
  2. Educate students to become educated consumers of language and culture.
  3. Learn to write for a specific audience.

“What we tried to do was to get them to think about their writing as something that was going to be published before a general audience on the World Wide Web.  So instead of saying of ‘Write as if you are writing for a magazine,’ now we said ‘Write a blog and hit Publish, and it’s on the Web, and anyone can read it.” – Peter Froehlich

Project Objectives

  1. Become familiar with 21st century digital media employers and college courses expect.
  2. Synthesize the events in one year into a unified thesis or “Zeitgeist” of what characterized that year.
  3. Introduce artifacts from a historic era including key speeches and quotes, images, video clips and other cultural artifacts.
  4. Become comfortable being on camera (each student in team had to be filmed).

“I think that these are skills that students are going to be asked to have in the workplace. Even if they never make another video, even if they never make another podcast at Penn State, they‘ve had this experience. – Maggie Froehlich

Project Stages

In this course students also write a blog documenting their writing and multimedia creation process throughout the semester.

Podcast (Four Weeks)

  1. Students propose year to review in 3rd week of class.
  2. Students prepare text draft of “Year in Review” by following week for review by another student. Final draft based on peer comments completed by end of week four.
  3. Podcast narrative models (e.g. NPR, radio plays introduced in Week five along with training in Garage Band software from campus Digital Commons consultant.
  4. Second peer review, then final script due to instructor
  5. Students record podcast with staggered due dates in order to reduce demand for computer time.

Video (Five Weeks)

  1. Video genre models introduced in class.
  2. Digital Commons consultants provide training in software.
  3. Teams are formed based on approximate era, and first draft presented for peer review in two weeks.
  4. Final video due one week later.
    Note: Intermediate due dates are set for submitting media to be included in the film (e.g. still images, archival footage) submitted.

Video Requirements

  1. Each year (i.e. content from individual student’s research) represented
  2. Each student on camera
  3. Use variety of transition devices & creative devices in iMovie

Skills Utilized

  • Writing for digital media
  • Digital podcast and video authoring
  • Teamwork
  • Creative storytelling
  • Teaching skills
  • Time management

Equipment and Software Used

Duration of Assignment

Four weeks for podcast (script draft and recording) and five weeks for video (script draft and recording).

Grading Process

The podcast and video both count as an “essay” writing assignment in this course and are graded primarily on the quality of the writing or structure as well as creativity.

The podcast is worth 20% of the total grade and the video is worth 25% of the grade.