Happy Friday! This Friday couldn't have come any sooner - I was painfully busy this week with issues unrelated to the internship. Unfortunately I was unable to complete any digital instructional content this week - though I'm working on something to help the students complete their peer reviews this weekend. My internship partner and I have also made progress on our final presentation. Let's get to it!
First, there's some important assignments on the horizon for the students of HIS-4150 History and Historiography. The first draft of their research paper is due next Monday. The requirements for this first draft are fairly simple and forgiving - just four solid pages. After turning in their first drafts they will be assigned to a peer review to provide feedback for each others' papers. Although this sounds fairly straightforward and simple, students often overthink their first drafts and struggle to give good feedback on peer reviews. This is why I'm working on an educational infographic that will give important tips regarding what a first draft should look like and how to give constructive feedback to their peers. Students often focus solely on the content and grammar of a first draft rather than the most significant factor: the thesis! The thesis and supporting main points should be the primary focus of the first drafts. The peer review should similarly focus on supplying feedback for the strength of the thesis and supporting points. However, students will sometimes ignore the main areas that need feedback, instead they will point out grammar mistakes or identify structural problems. The problem is that those minor changes are simple to change and can be identified by the writer. The most important advice a historical writer can get is constructive feedback directed at the strength of the thesis. I'm still working on the infographic, but hopefully I can send it out to the students this weekend.
The other major focal point of this week was the planning of our internship presentation in August. I met with my internship parter on Zoom this past Tuesday to organize and discuss our presentation. The presentation is roughly twenty minutes in length, with fifteen or so minutes dedicated to the actual presentation and five minutes relegated to questions and answers. The structure of the presentation is broken into five sections: introduction, skills, challenges, rewards, and conclusion. We plan on introducig ourselves, then spending a couple minutes each on the middle sections, switiching back and forth to recount our own experiences. I'd like to share some of the content we've created over the course of the semester, although I'm terrible with technology and am not entirely sure how to do that! We're going to meet earlier that week to practice our presentation and hash out the final details.
That's all for this week! Hopefully next week I'll actually have the time to finish some of the content I've been working on. We'll see next week!