Open English @ SLCC is an evolving digital book created and maintained by English Department faculty at Salt Lake Community College. It exists to provide our faculty–over one hundred full- and part-time instructors–with robust, flexible, and locally produced open educational resources (OER) that can be used for teaching a variety of courses across our composition sequence.

This book is evolving and adaptive, offering a range of texts on rhetoric, writing and reading, all written by SLCC faculty with specific attention to the needs of SLCC students and the local conditions of our work and study at a large, multi-campus, increasingly diverse community college in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unlike a traditional textbook, the writing in this book invites remix, adaptation, and repurposing to match the specific needs of its users–SLCC writing students and instructors primarily–but also faculty and students at other schools, course designers, WPAS, and anyone else interested in open texts about writing, language and literacy.

Open English @ SLCC is a community-authored, community-focused text, one that invites conversation, change, addition, and repurposing over time in the interests of attuning itself to the needs of those who use it. To this end the book invites public digital annotation through Hypothesis, allowing readers to add notes, questions, observations and resources directly to the texts. This ethos of shared knowledge, creative reuse, and ongoing conversation is at the heart of the Open English @ SLCC project.

Our goals
From the beginning, this was conceived as an ongoing project. This website will be used in our courses and will continue to be developed by students. The goal is for people to learn about metacognition and its role in learning. We believe that learning can happen the most effectively when learners engage with open educational resources not just as passive consumers of information, but as active participants in meaningful knowledge creation.

Why metacognition?
Developing metacognitive awareness is shown to contribute to learning transfer, helping learners to use their knowledge and apply what they've learned in new contexts. As English teachers, we know that metacognitive awareness and the open discussion of metacognitive processes helps learners to develop and refine skills in reading, writing, and researching. Metacognition is something we all do in countless contexts, so it's something that anyone can meaningfully engage in discussing and learning.

Please join us!
We hope that other instructors will encourage their students to engage with these OER in the spirit of open pedagogy. We selected metacognition as a topic from the perspective of English teachers, knowing its integral role in working with language. We believe that metacognitive awareness is crucial to any type of learning. In particular, learners focused on study skills and college success benefit greatly from metacognitive awareness. Learners of psychology and education would also have much to gain from engaging with this topic.

If you're an instructor who would like to use this site in your courses, please email us at george.zamzow@pcc.edu

Students will use the outdoor space to generate opinions and facts about the space which they will use to write about how the space should be used.

The students will create a woven scrapbook exploring and weaving different genres: poetry, narrative, expository/informative and argumentative/persuasive. In preparation for the book students will need to address literacy, rights and self advocacy. This lesson will pull into current events in the local community and make connections to global scale. As an extension teachers can digitize pieces from the individual books and tie into a longer documentary piece.

This PBL activity teaches young students about stranger safety. By bringing in a guest speaker to the classroom, having students create their own scenarios and responses, and having them write a letter to someone they want to thank for keeping them safe, this activity allows students to practice their writing and listening skills while learning an important real-life lesson about strangers at the same time.

As each language has its own alphabet, it also has its own grammar. For English, all the words we see are divided into nine classes or categories. These classes are called Parts of Speech. The dictionaries we use always mention the category of the word and tell us if a word is used in multiple categories of the Parts of Speech.
Knowing the grammar of a language will not enable fluency in your speaking or writing, but it helps. Knowing the functions of the elements of language (i.e. words) helps us in their appropriate and accurate use. This preamble is necessary so as to make us read the definitions and explanations as a new thing; devoid of the stereotyping that happened to us at schools.

In this lesson plan, students will think and write creatively using nouns and adjectives. They will experience all phases of the writing process.

The Peer Review Kit: A Resource for Educators was developed by learning designers at ed2go, a Cengage company. The kit provides portable peer review content that can be repurposed and revised by educators to suit their specific online course needs. This lesson explains what peer review is, why it's important, and how to practice peer review in an online setting (both asynchronous and synchronous). Content is specific to creative writing, but can be easily modified to fit other subject areas. Quick true or false self-assessments, a multiple-choice quiz, sample peer review assignments, rubrics, discussion prompts, and resources for further learning are also provided. Peer review is a valuable communication skill that employers seek out in potential employees. Strategies for how to apply this soft skill to the job hunt are discussed within the lesson.

This is a guide for students to use as they provide feedback to their peers on a piece of writing. The activity was done in groups of 3.

Presented in partnership with Kahoot!, World Explorer Trivia helps students prove their world knowledge through a fun and fast paced trivia grame!1. Choose the PenPal Schools Kahoot! that you would like to play by clicking the links to the left.2. Follow the directions on the Kahoot! website3. Have fun!

This article assembles free resources from the Peoples of the Arctic issue of the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears cyberzine into a unit outline based on the 5E learning cycle framework. Outlines are provided for Grades K-2 and 3-5.

Perseus is an evolving digital library, engineering interactions through time, space, and language. Our primary goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. We anticipate that greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas.

You’ve probably learned about point of view in previous English classes, even as far back as elementary school. It’s an important aspect of storytelling, including storytelling in the form of the personal narrative. In this seminar, you will refresh your memory about point of view and push your learning to determine the role it plays in a narrative. You will also be imagining different stories that you have to tell, considering how your personal narratives might change depending on the point of view. Seeing a conflict from a different perspective is important, so analyzing it through the lens of someone else could have a strong impact on your writing. In short, you will focus not just on the story itself but also the voice telling the story.StandardsCC.1.4.9-10.MWrite narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events.CC.1.4.9-10.NEngage and orient the reader by setting out a problem, situation, or observation, establishing one or multiple points of view, and introducing a narrator and/or characters.CC.1.4.9-10.PCreate a smooth progression of experiences or events using a variety of techniques to sequence events so that they build on one another to create a coherent whole; provide a conclusion that follows from and reflects on what is experienced, observed, or resolved over the course of the narrative.  

Personalizing the Writing Experience

A person using both a paper notebook and pen alongside a laptop computer
We often take for granted just how complex the act of writing is, and the range of mental and motor skills it involves. While we each go about the process of writing in our own unique way, some distinct steps are typically involved: pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing.

You may experience barriers in any of these steps of the writing process that can keep you from being a successful writer. Fortunately, the devices many of us already own have a range of built-in features to support you at each stage of the writing process, and many free or low-cost apps and extensions are also available.

A rubric in student language written for middle school students to self-assess their persuasive writing.

A rubric in student language written for middle school students to self-assess their persuasive writing.

This Learning Plan was created by Tessie Boudreau as part of the 2020 NDE OER Project. The attached Remote Learning Plan is designed for Grade 6 English Language Arts students. Students will understand the components of a book review and real life application.  Students will draft and publish their own book review using persuasive writing techniques. This Remote Learning Plan addresses the following NDE Standard: NE LA It is expected that this Unit Plan will take students 1-2 weeks to complete.  

This resource was created by Katie Mace, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

Students use the free computer game Pingus to learn how engineers, specifically environmental engineers, use their technical writing skills to give instructions and follow the instructions of others. Students learn to write instructions to express their ideas in clear, organized ways using descriptive, un-ambiguous sentences, as an example of one type of technical writing that important for engineers. The students write instructions enumerating how to beat a game level, which represents surveying that level for environmental problems. As a test of their instructions, students review each others' instructions and offer suggestions for improvement, and then revise their instructions to make them better. Students also see some examples of environmental problems.