Teaching with the Website

Planning Your Course

Putting Your Course Online

Internet Course Resources

Website Section Models

In designing this website as a teaching tool, our goals were to create a user-friendly site for students and teachers. For students, we wanted the site to be easy to navigate, with easy-to-interpret icons, so that they could apply their existing web skills (or, if they had no prior experience with the web, so that they could acquire some rudimentary skills quickly). For teachers, we wanted the site to facilitate course management, with one place where they could post, and students could find, key course materials and information (with the practical outcome of reducing the number of handouts to be managed each week). For all, we wanted to create a site that would extend the conversations of the classroom writing community, allowing readers and writers to reconnect to their sections in between class meetings, to post their writing and read and comment on what others had written, and to develop a sense of audience as related to an ongoing exchange through which writers and readers build shared knowledge, meanings, and purposes.

With our diverse commuter population, we were also concerned to enhance the connection of our freshman students to the university and help build a sense of real community, so we’ve made space for class pictures, student pictures, and student profiles that can help our students get to know each other.Teaching your freshman writing sections with the website can help your students to become familiar with the ways in which information and communicative technologies are used in the literacy practices of academic settings.  Once they’re familiar with the use of a course website, they’ll be in a better position to engage in the work of their many other web-linked courses at the university, and to position themselves as readers and writers in other contexts that make use of technological resources. 

By following the links above , you will find further information to guide you in planning your course to make use of website feature and in using Contribute and the Fireworks Image Editor to put your course materials online.  In addition, you'll find Internet Course Resources that other faculty have found useful, to bring into your own section's resource page.  Finally, we've made links to the web pages for several course sections that offer examples of how the site has been used.