Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Day 2--Syllabus

I created my syllabus using Piktochart, an infographic creator. My rationale included a desire to streamline the information, eliminate paper, and keep it interesting and fresh enough to capture and hold the interest of freshmen. One thing that turning your syllabus into an infographic does is makes you thoughtfully consider which information is most important. I don't need a novel to explain and preview my class; rather, a simple, colorful, image-based syllabus lets me visually represent the ideas that I'm verbally sharing without expecting students to read three pages worth of material (most won't).

I made some choices about how to organize my infographic syllabus. My name and the class name is at the top along with materials needed. I include my three overall improvement goals--schema, skills, and strengths (our 12 week theme) near the top as well, and make sure that students know everything we work on will fall into one of those three categories. Students always want to know about grades, and so I include the category breakdowns. I also decorate it with a mustache to add a bit of whimsy--don't take grades too seriously is my message.

I also include a breakdown of skills students will focus on. Since my academy students also have a reading class, we focus on writing and discussion/presentation skills more than reading. I added a cool picture and demonstrated citing my source below the picture. I added class rules and then explained what I meant by each. I included a Tagul word cloud in the share of a globe that has many of the technology tools we'll be using. I wanted to add a list of all the tools; students probably wouldn't read it; that was my compromise.

There are some pieces of the infographic syllabus process that I might revise for next year. I didn't add the themes of the three units because I was still revising the order and wording when I made the syllabus. I would also add my class blog site for students to write down or a QR code linking them to the site. I didn't hand out a syllabus because I posted it my blog, but that means parents need to wait until their student is following my blog to see the syllabus. Finally, I might create a full-color printout for students to take a camera phone photo of or use the QR code to link to the class blog, just to increase accessibility.

https://magic.piktochart.com/output/2438304-language-lab-syllabus

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