The Writing Across the Curriculum team provides services for instructors and faculty in any discipline who are incorporating writing into their teaching. Writing is a powerful and important tool for learning, and we can help you use it as effectively as possible. We will e-mail you a few times this quarter to inform you about our services and to give you helpful tips for using writing in your teaching. Here are some tips that can help you on your first day of teaching:

On February 6, Writing across the Curriculum hosted a workshop called Students and Podcasting: Composing Audio Projects in the Classroom for university instructors and students. The speakers included Dr. Chris Manion from Writing across the Curriculum, Dr. Dickie Selfe from Humanities Information Systems, and Dr. Tim Rhodus from the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science. The speakers discussed the benefits of using podcasting in designing assignments and different technologies available like Blogger.com and OurMedia.org.

On April 17, I had the pleasure of talking with Caroline Su's Women's Studies 215 students about developing good thesis statements. The students were preparing to work on an essay assignment for the following class, in which they were required to analyze gender issues in the novel The Bell Jar.

After our plans for a workshop last quarter were foiled by a winter storm, Trisha Davis, Associate Professor and Rights Management Coordinator at University Libraries, and I spoke with several instructors about copyright as it applies to instructors and students at OSU, as well as pointing to a broad view of intellectual property in the academy that looks at the ownership of ideas in and across different disciplines.

Thanks for your great participation to our workshop entitled 'The Ownership of Language: International Instructors' responding to students' writing.

This was our second year in a row working with Theatre graduate students. For this workshop, we were asked to come and discuss "Creating Effective Writing Assignments."

First, I’d like to say thank you to all who attended our Drawing to Learn workshop. I think we had a great conversation about how and why to assign visual composing assignments for students. I also want to thank David Staley (History) and Vicki Daiello (Art Education) for sharing the visual composing assignments they have used with their students and for talking about the challenges and rewards of teaching visual composing in their disciplines.

I've spoken at a number of venues over the past few quarters about wikis and collaborative writing, so I'm going to pull my comments together in one post.

Beck André, the manager of eLearning at OSU's Technology Enhanced Learning and Research (TELR), and I put together this workshop to explore the possibilities Carmen (OSU's course management platform) offers for writing activities.

It is half way through the quarter and my students are still struggling with their thesis statements. How can I help students understand and write better thesis statements?