LaunchPad Solo for Hacker Handbooks is designed to help students improve the skills they need for academic writing. The following tips will help students—and instructors—get the most out of the resources that LaunchPad Solo for Hacker Handbooks has to offer.

Applying handbook lessons to a current essay or project

Through writing prompts called “Writing practice,” student writers are asked to think carefully about issues related to audience, purpose, planning, use of evidence, peer review, revision, and more—and extend their handbook’s instruction to their own writing. Once submitted, the student’s responses report conveniently to the instructor gradebook.

Understanding genre expectations

College courses require students to compose in many different genres (types of writing), and sometimes the best way to get a grasp on the expectations of a genre is to see a sample. LaunchPad Solo extends the instruction of the print handbook by including more than thirty models of student writing in a variety of genres—essays, lab reports, annotated bibliographies, reviews of the literature, proposals, memos, reflective letters, and more. Instructors can assign the models as classwork or homework or project them in class for a group activity.

Taking a personal approach to practice

Some students will need a lot of practice with a topic; others, a little. LearningCurve, the adaptive quizzing feature in LaunchPad Solo, adjusts the delivery of questions to student performance—so it allows students to get just the right amount of practice with a topic. Students get practice with sentence skills and rhetorical skills in activities covering topics from commas and sentence fragments to critical reading, topic sentences, and argument. Instructors can assign quizzes based on the problems they’re seeing in drafts or as an extension of class instruction. Results report conveniently to the instructor gradebook.

Doing more than just watching videos

Perfect for the YouTube generation, LaunchPad includes plenty of videos to watch—engaging videos about reading actively, persuading passionately, researching something that matters, and more. Using the video editing tools in LaunchPad, instructors can assign, annotate, and add questions or comments to these videos, and students can view them—and respond to them—actively and critically. Responses to questions can be set as public, so that peers can see and respond to both the video content and other peers’ responses.