One look at my desk at home or in the GTA office and someone who did not know me would be able to discern that I am lax on my organizational skills. I would argue that I know where everything is, so it is more like organized chaos. To counterbalance that, I do try to present my class materials to my current students on Blackboard in a very careful manner. I have weekly folders, which contains folders for each day of the week that the class meets. Within these daily folders, I have the materials that were discussed in class. I also have a page just with folders for each project. That way, students can go to that page and easily find the projects requirement or peer review rubrics for each project.
However, before enrolling in Teaching Writing Online, I had not even thought about how to organize my course materials for this hypothetical online class. Luckily, after reading the chapter on organization in Scott Warnock’s amazing book Teaching Writing Online: How and Why, I was able to get some good ideas about how to organize for an online writing class. According to Warnock, he argues that online writing teacher shouldn’t “underestimate the importance of being organized in the online teaching environment…Make sure your files and folder systems reflect the kind of structure that you want for the class and allow you to use student texts to good advantage throughout the course” (49). I was a bit upset at myself by being shocked by this statement. Of course, I should be thinking about how I am going to organize my online writing class, because my current system is not going to work for the type of classroom. First and foremost, I cannot do folders for each day that the class meets, since the class will never meet in person.
But, then, I was stumped. I was left to wonder then how do I organize this online writing class? Luckily, Warnock strikes again with a suggestion that would work wonderfully in my hypothetical online writing class. His idea, the Weekly Plan, is organized to allow his students to have “a complete set of the activities they must accomplish, broken down into specific (and easily completed tasks)” (Warnock 54). He even includes a sample of this Weekly Plan in his book at the end, which was extremely helpful for me to see. I especially like his point that the Weekly Plan is a way for students to stay on top of the coursework (55). After all, in my experience, online courses are often the ones that get put on the backburner, especially if the students have on-campus classes on their schedule.
As someone with a propensity to being disorganized, setting up a class calendar is probably my least favorite thing to do as a teacher. How can I determine what I am supposed to teach when I do not even know how my students will handle these lessons? That is why this particular chapter was so crucial for my understanding of teaching online writing. In this chapter, Warnock was able to express why organization is so crucial of not only the success of my hypothetical online writing class but also extremely imperative to the success of my hypothetical online writing students. Without organization, it, and by default my students, will surely fail. I guess, with that motivation, I need to find a better way to organize my desks.
Works Cited
Warnock, Scott. Teaching Writing Online: How and Why. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2009. Print.
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