As mentioned in the general instructions for this project, (Link will open in this tab.) your job here will be to create a page that introduces all relevant context for the rest of your peers to properly understand all the important intricacies of your oral presentation (Aristotle, Self Love and Aristotle, Three Kinds of Friendship).
To the extent possible, try to find engaging audio and visual resources to make everyone’s learning experience as fun and interesting as possible. This could include podcast episodes, lectures, presentations, animations, movie clips, songs, experiments, comedy, etc. The only thing to really keep in mind here is that these resources are all supposed to help provide the background and context to help your audience understand the material you will be covering at a higher level of intellectual sophistication in your video presentation, and that these materials be relevant to the ideas being explored in the reading (for instance, biographical information about the author may not actually be helpful if it doesn’t actually help us understand the readings, so dispense with it if it isn’t actually on point).
Feel free to contact me (following our standard communication protocol) for feedback, comments, etc. This is a working project, and so I’m happy to offer some help as you continue to develop this page.
Keep in mind also that this page will represent your Term Paper grade. I’ve been working you all pretty hard this semester, so instead of asking you to write a real research paper, this will suffice. As such, the more thorough, interesting and entertaining your page, the better your grade, and since this single assignment represents a significant portion of your final grade for the semester, you’ll want to make it an excellent one.
Introductory Page (Link will open in this tab.)
In addition to your own video presentation, you are to create an introductory page with resources (ideally video and audio) to help your peers contextualize and better understand the main reading and your own video presentation.
If you want an example of what this could look like, just take a look at the pages I’ve already created on the various readings we’ve covered this semester: I’ve used video presentations, lectures, documentaries, biographies, animations, audiobooks, podcasts, links to other relevant readings, etc.
And the material that I have posted in those pages isn’t random: I have attempted to provide resources that are engaging, interesting, funny, and thought-provoking (in fact, out of all the material that I go through on any given subject, only about 15 to 20% of it is interesting, engaging and relevant enough to share with you all). Obviously, you should also aim to find resources to share with the rest of the class that they will find informative, interesting and stimulating.
Although you will submit your video presentations elsewhere (for grading purposes), you should also make sure to embed it (Link will open in this tab.) in this introductory page so that the rest of your peers can benefit from it.
Since Canvas doesn’t seem to provide an option for you to be able to save your work and continue to work on it before submitting it as a graded assignment, I have created a separate page for each of you to be able to start gathering and organizing your resources, writings and ideas (to find your individual pages, just click on the title of this section, which will take you to the module where they’re all grouped together). Given this odd compromise, please make sure to only visit your own individual page for now. Let’s respect everyone else’s privacy and process until their work is ready to be shared with the rest of us. I will be keeping tabs behind the scenes to make sure that everyone is complying.
Learning how to use the Rich Content Editor
Visit this site (Link will open in new tab.) (Links to an external site.) to learn more about how to use the Rich Content Editor in Canvas.
The following are direct links to some of the most relevant things you’ll probably need to learn how to use:
To keep things organized and uniform for everyone, don’t change the default font type and settings.
Embedding Audio & Video Media
By this point you all know how to embed a YouTube video into Canvas, (Link will open in this tab.) so if you find interesting documentaries, lectures, or presentations (and certainly do include your own videos), feel free to post them to your page. The embedding process, by the way, would be the same with other services (Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc.).
You are also more than welcome to post audio podcast episodes.
However, most podcast sites do not make it easy to embed their content directly into your page, but there are aggregators that do provide the means to do this. As you can probably tell already from what you’ve seen in the pages I’ve posted so far, one of my favorite services is ListenNotes. (Link will open in new tab.) (Links to an external site.)
Another growing podcast aggregator is Spotify, (Link will open in new tab.) (Links to an external site.) and their app provides a few options so you can customize the appearance of the episodes you wish to embed:
One of the most popular aggregators is Stitcher (Link will open in new tab.) (Links to an external site.) (though I would actually recommend staying away from it):
I would recommend using Stitcher only as a last result: if you can’t find any other aggregator that includes the podcast(s) you’d like to embed.
Finally, OmnyStudio (Link will open in new tab.) (Links to an external site.) has a very nice player interface,
In any case, you’re obviously not limited to these only. If you’re curious about other services, the folks at Podcast Insights (Link will open in new tab.) (Links to an external site.) have put together a helpful compilation of podcast players you could use to embed audio content directly into Canvas. Whatever you use, the real point is that it be something that can be accessed by your peers directly from Canvas.
