6.3.22 Getting the Ball Rolling

Hurricane season is here in Florida! Rain pours down every other afternoon, offering a nice opportunity to study, read, write and work online. This week involved meeting over Zoom, learning and preparing for our tutoring role, and tentatively creating content for the History Lab. I'm not the most experienced at creating online media, but I'm excited to start creating informative content to hone my computer skills. I've begun to experiment with various media creation services and sites like Canva and UCF's Materia. It's not much, but I made the following infographic on Canva:

This is just a small first step as I get a feel for content creation and improve my skills with Canva and other platforms. Historical thinking skills are important concepts to learn for an undergraduate student of history. My goal was to make something simple that would be universally helpful to a student analyzing primary sources, reading secondary sources, or composing an essay. Learning these critical thinking and analytical skills and how to use them is an important step towards good source analysis and paper writing. When writing essays I often found myself switching between pocket guides, textbooks, source material, and tabs of online resources. I hope I can create guides and infographics that students can quickly review at a glance to remind themselves of these fundamental concepts.

I plan on producing more informative media for the History Lab throughout the semester. I think the written content pages of History Lab are good. However, students often search for more concise, easy to consume information that they can quickly learn and apply to their writing. I hope I can fill this need with infographics and simple, interactive guides. I've also tried creating a couple of games using UCF's Materia tool, although I'm not entirely familiar with it as a tool. I'll need to practice more with Materia over the next few weeks to create more useful and interactive practice quizzes.

The first assignment for the classes we'll be assisting isn't due for another week, so there's not much tutoring to do at the moment. My fellow intern Polina and I met with our supervisor this week to discuss the details of what we'll be doing. We will lookout for specific mistakes like use of passive voice (or pen, or keyboard I suppose), if their thesis matches all the requirements of what makes a thesis, proper citation, and so on. I love helping others, especially with subjects I have a passion for, so I'm excited to start tutoring when the opportunity emerges. Until then, I'll focus on producing online material that students can apply to their studying and writing. As students turn in and receive their first assignments they should begin to use History Lab more and more. We'll need to be ready to assist when they need it.

That's it for this week! Next week I plan on producing some more infographics with Canva, some games with Materia, and perhaps a more interactive or engaging guide for students to use.