Praxis Paper
Welcome to YOUniversity, a nationwide organization that helps students from all over the country with the college process! This website is home to the Hobart and William Smith Colleges chapter of YOUniversity, so there’s plenty of information for students looking at HWS as a possible future college destination, too. We will provide resources that connect to various videos, quizzes and webquest links that will help students be prepared to apply for the institution of their dreams. The display of multimodal resources will help a diverse range of students and parents. Before we start our lesson, we will ask each student to come up with a set of 2-3 questions about the college application process and what they hope to learn. This will prepare our students to engage in a growth mindset and promote positive thoughts about the often difficult application process. It also allows us to understand what information you would like to know more about so we are able to help you as much as possible. Our goal is to make a daunting task much more fun for students and their families. We hope to remediate some of these areas of inaccessibility and serve as a sponsor of literacy that is both free and convenient (Brandt, 1998). We also hope that our lesson will provide students with a feeling of agency and independence. After all, this process is all about YOU! That being said, YOUniversity is a fantastic website for both teachers and parents, too. Our engaging website is accessible to all.
The specific goals of this website also delve into the often more difficult topics when it comes to figuring out college applications. We will review the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and other opportunities to apply for student aid specific to individual states. We also provide students with access to scholarships specific to their identity, life experiences, and location. This is meant to cater to a potentially diverse body of users and allows them to use the many facets of their identity as a tool throughout the college application process. We want you to hear our own stories through multimodal literacies like blogs, question and answer videos with subtitles and descriptive audio files to make an interactive, informative experience about the college process that can’t be found anywhere else (Park, 2015). This is important because we understand that new practices of literacy, as Davies (2012) writes in her article “Computers and Education,” have emerged for this generation of students. At the end of our lesson, we will provide students with a rubric meant to help them reflect on what they’ve learned.
YOUniversity 