digital tools

We make new media an active part of our own research, collaborations and mentorship. While digital tools and pedagogies often deepen learning and engagement for students, increasingly the conversations about teaching within digital humanities frameworks presume a level of familiarity with digital tools that can exclude many teachers from participating.

Digital pedagogies are often a specific focus of individual mentorship and of requested workshops. On this page we have curated a small collection of classroom tested assignments that use digital tools and which are discussed in ways that do not assume prior familiarity with these tools or their applications. We hope to enable teachers to adapt digital tools in meaningful pedagogical contexts.

This collection of assignments is curated from colleagues willing to share their experience teaching with digital tools. What follows is a brief description of a specific assignment, the digital platform it uses, links to examples and to further resources. Feel free to adapt and use whatever you need.

Social Media in the Literature Classroom

Our students’ facility with social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and personal blogging sites can be useful scaffolding for teaching the context, reception and circulation of literatures of different time periods. Dr. Kirsten Saxton uses Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr to situate eighteenth-century political writing (the “pamphlet wars”) in her eighteenth-century literature course at Mills College. Dr. … Continue reading Social Media in the Literature Classroom

THE SELFIE: Building Classroom Culture

In an introductory course in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Rebekah Edwards adapts a Selfie Reflection assignment, first developed by Mark Marino and than extended by Adeline Koh, to help students articulate and develop the vocabulary, concepts, and skills useful for critically discussing race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, dis/ability and other identity categories that are socially construed from embodied … Continue reading THE SELFIE: Building Classroom Culture

Collaborative Digital Publication Projects

Blogging platforms have made it easy to incorporate digital publishing projects into a course curriculum. Digital publishing offers students an easy and immediate way to experience collaborative writing production and a taste of “professional” work expectations and practices. Publication may raise the stakes of writing assignments for students. Rather than a private exchange between the professor and … Continue reading Collaborative Digital Publication Projects

VoiceThread: Four Strategies

VoiceThread is a subscription based software in which you can build an asynchronistic discussion  (through video, audio or text-based comments) around an image or set of images. Imagine a slide presentation that allows your students to add comments around each slide. It is an easy and accessible interface for students to record their thoughts (offering video, … Continue reading VoiceThread: Four Strategies