The Digital Skills Crescendo is a tool for making transfer visible, as it helps facilitate student-led conversations about how the skills they are learning are applicable to their unique personal, academic, and professional contexts. I created this resource to help students in my ENG-W171: Projects in Digital Literacy and Composition visualize at a glance how the digital skills they were learning were scaffolded. The Crescendo outlines the digital tools used to produce a set of deliverables, culminating in a carefully branded and curated portfolio at the end of the semester. Additionally, it makes note of which of the five modes of communication are most applicable for each deliverable.

Creativity, as a transferrable competency, is career agnostic. Now more than ever, career readiness means empowering students as creators in digital spaces, and our assessment practices can play a role in realizing this pursuit. The Creator Portfolio, an iterative capstone project, creates space for metacognitive thinking while leveraging design technologies (such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Canva) to showcase and promote student work. This project allows students to (1) reflect on, curate, and annotate a set of artifacts produced during the semester and (2) learn how to produce a professional digital portfolio using a platform like Adobe Portfolio, Canva, Google Sites, or Wix.

How do genres work, and how can we assess students’ understanding of their makeup? This assignment includes a three-pronged essay component and a multimodal remediation, allowing students to distill and translate their genre study into a new learning object. This assignment can easily be applied to the study of any artistic genre.

For this assignment, students imagine that they have been hired as graphic designers for a university press. Their first on-the-job assignment is to design a book cover (using Canva’s free book cover template, Microsoft Publisher, Google Slides, or Adobe Illustrator) for a new edition of the novel we are studying. There are two components to this project: the digital cover design and a written rationale.

In this activity, students remediate content originally published as a written text into an image or graphic for a social media platform such as Instagram.

This activity, using the social annotation tool Hypothesis, encourages students to become more attentive readers and thoughtful collaborators in a digital environment.

As a digital humanities tool, corpus analysis allows students to visually map language use. Adopted as a tool for anti-racist pedagogy, corpus analysis allows us to recognize from a distance the role race plays in a given text, visualizing its prominences, patterns, and even silences. Co-created with Annelise Norman.

If you are looking for a way to not only assess content knowledge or reading comprehension but also get students thinking metacognitively, then this activity is for you.

This active learning activity tasks students with both peer reviewing and revising essay introductions. In small groups, students move through multiple rounds as they comment on another group's anonymized introductions.

A tool for students to articulate their definition of creativity, as well as their creative self-perception, goals, and ideal conditions.

In order to effectively analyze the entirety of a rigorous text, whether it be a primary or secondary source, students need to hone their comprehension and analysis skills. This activity empowers students to practice their close reading skills by unpacking one part of a larger whole. Paragraph mapping is a visual close reading strategy that begins when students select one particularly rich or dense paragraph or passage from an assigned text. They start by identifying, researching, and defining four key vocabulary words. Then, they research the context of the text’s authorship before summarizing, analyzing, and reflecting on the passage.

This activity aims to help students collaboratively build foundational knowledge of genre conventions. It was initially designed for literature courses but can easily be adapted for other courses incorporating genre study.

This quick-reference guide defines multimodality and the five modes of communication for students in writing & digital projects-based courses.

This quick-reference guide introduces students to the genre of the humanities research proposal and its key components.

This quick-reference guide introduces students to the genre of the annotated bibliography and includes a four-step process for crafting annotations.

This handout or quick-reference guide introduces students to the difference between primary and secondary sources.

This handout or quick-reference guide introduces students to the difference between summarizing, paraphrasing, and directly quoting a source.

This quick-reference guide recaps the purpose of peer review and provides a series of guiding questions that prompt students to respond to an essay's thesis, structure, and use of evidence.

This document introduces students to Sappho's Fragment 16 ("To Anactoria") through a series of guiding questions, annotations, and comparative translations. This series of open-access introductory reading guides is intended for use in general education literature courses but can be adapted for a variety of classroom contexts. By making ancient literature accessible, we inspire students’ creativity and critical thinking skills while giving them the tools to better understand and reckon with our cultural heritage.

Learn about what differentiates the memoir from other genres of life writing, including the autobiography and biography.

This video introduces students to the generic conventions of the book review and includes tips for getting started as a critic.

A crash course on writing unique, focused, and significant thesis statements.

A crash course on writing cohesive and coherent body paragraphs.