Cramer's Communication Resources
Hello and welcome to my Communication Resources website. If you do not wish to read about why this site exists, start browsing the links.
After several years of academic and self-taught computer and website design experience, I began teaching. I taught agriculture classes that had a heavy technology and communication emphasis part time for three years and then switched to English where I have taught computer intensive composition and advance writing classes part time for the past five years. In both disciplines, I have seen many people, students and professors alike, struggle when it comes to using technology effectively. I have had success using technology in the classroom. My basis for claiming success teaching with these tools comes from being recognized for excellence in teaching by student groups nine times in the past four years.
An interest in using technology in the classroom led me to serve on the Assessment Committee for ISUComm (an initiative at Iowa State focused on creating technology intensive, multimodal composition courses). My service for ISUComm involved attending the curricular meetings of the seven colleges at Iowa State to assess and report about the concerns the colleges had regarding the ISUComm initiative. One common concern among all seven colleges was the marginalizing impact that the ISUComm initiative could have on transfer students who came from institutions that did not share the multiliteracy (written, spoken, and visual) initiative. Another common concern was the lack of faculty preparation to teach multimodal communication.
The concern I developed about these issues after performing the assessment led me to withdraw from ISUComm. I felt that the initiative could allow the potential negative aspects of technology to become invisible (unquestioned) once teachers were no longer allowed to choose the tools with which they would teach. ISUComm is currently addressing the concerns identified by the colleges through institutional transfer agreements and workshops to train teachers on the use of technology in the communication classroom. I no longer have a direct link to ISUComm, and I am not in a position to teach future teachers to be critics of technology; however, I still wish to help teachers (and students) use technology effectively to enhance student learning.
For these reasons, I have created this website to assist teachers and students with developing some "basic" technology skills to ease the transition to technology intensive courses. In the interest of promoting multimodal communication, I have created and linked at the top of the page tutorials for written (Word 2003), spoken (PowerPoint 2003), and visual/electronic (Macromedia Dreamweaver, v8) technologies. To assist teachers with finding other online resources, I have linked (to the left) and annotated numerous resources that I have used in my courses. The resources share links to online texts (Classical Rhetoric), provide methods for helping students write (ESL and Composition) and conduct research (Internet Tips and Citation Styles), detail advanced writing techniques (Professional Comm), and offer tools for website design (Website Design).
If you need help with a topic that I have not covered, have a resource that you think should be added to the site, or think a topic should be added to the tutorials, please email me. |
