After a challenging project, or during the composition of a prolonged communication product, I often ask my students to reflect on their thoughts and concerns about the process of communicating with others. My usual approach is using a freewrite assignment that they can complete during a few minutes of class time.
While these reflections are informative and can help me as I revise my assignments, the writing is very private by nature. It's handwritten on paper and written primarily for me. This semester I attempted something different. Instead of the standard hand-written-words-on-paper reflection, I had them create a meme (pronounced "meem") to explain their feelings about the assignments and/or share their thoughts about the end of the semester.
Emily recommend I use quickmeme.com, and the class really seemed to find the program accessible. As it turned out, no one in my class had created a meme although they had all seen them on their social networking sites. They had 10 minutes to find a picture, add the words to created their meme, and post their memes on our Facebook group.
The result was lots of fun and some compelling class discussion. As memes were posted on Facebook, I would project the image. While some of the memes were more effective than others, the class learned how to create a meme, and I learned what they were going through during these last few weeks of the semester.
Most importantly, the class learned they were not alone. We are all feeling stressed and overwhelmed at the end of the semester. Instructors and technology associates included. Now...I need to get some grading done.
No comments:
Post a Comment