WordPress Used to Support Coursework, Blogging and Digital Storytelling Projects – Fall 2011

Faculty are showing increased interest in the use of Spark wordPress sites to support creation of student work. This past fall, AT staff worked with several faculty to combine the use of wordPress sites with software for creating digital stories to have students create video content for assignments in their courses.
Faculty in German, Russian and Asian Languages used a wordPress site to host material for their course and to link to student blogs written in German. Students were required to blog weekly and to comment on their peers’ blogs. The faculty members then reflected upon student work in the main site created for the course. For a final project in the course, students created a digital story using a free account in VoiceThread, and linked these directly to their personal blogs. German 21, the Changing Faces of Germany site can be viewed here.
AT staff also collaborated with colleagues from Tisch library and the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning on a digital storytelling project for Biology 7, Environmental Biology in which students were required to create a short, research based ”infomercial” on a topic related to environmental change. The project was designed to increase students’ skills in science communication by asking them to integrate scholarly research with images, narrative and music and to use knowledge gained via lectures, assigned readings and independent research to become science “teachers.”
The Bio 7 project also made use of a wordPress site to provide details for and structure around the assignment and to post student work. Students then used iMovie to create their stories. The Bio 7 project and student videos can be viewed here.