I just want to quickly end this blog on NCTE by saying that I attended only part of one session on Sunday. Here's why: it was supposed to be on "Harnassing the Potential of Google Docs." So I was excited about the topic. When I went to the session, though, this one man was just talking about surveys he had done with his students. He never seemed to get to the point. So the only thing I really learned was that Google Docs can be used for spreadsheet/survey applications....which is interesting, but I sort of knew this already.
This was followed by lunch at Lockwood: cobb salad appetizer, turkey burger with carmelized onions, arugula, and shepherd's hope cheese, and, of course, iced tea with lemon. VERY tasty.
Then off to O'Hare airport in a limo for a 4-hour wait until I jumped on the 6 pm flight (90 min. before my originally scheduled one).
That's all, folks!
Brian
Monday, November 21, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Day #2: Better Sessions!
I woke up earlier today, so I was able to attend a lot more sessions. After a breakfast at Starbucks (cheese danish and coffee--$10--ouch!), I headed to my 9:30 session.
This session was called "Writing the Future: Student Writing and Social Technologies." The first to speak was Chris Gerben from UM Ann Arbor. His presentation was called "Hidden on the Wall: Revealing the Collaborative Writing and Knowledge Construction Present on Facebook and Other Social Online Spaces." Mostly, it seemed, he focused on Facebook primarily. He argued that collaboration and knowledge construction does occur on Facebook, but he noted that some things are missing from it, including identity maintenace, responsibility, finality, ownership, and consensus (I have noticed that "finality" is an issue in Facebook projects, too). Then, Luke Vasileiou from LaGuardia CC talked about "Online Learning Communities: Applications for Composition Classrooms." Vasileiou works with blogs in his classrooms and he showed how students posted on blogs, commented on each other, and edited their own work. Sometimes the students were all in the same class, but sometimes students in one class would comment on the work of students in another class. One interesting point--the average English 101 post response at the beginning of the term was 230 words, but at midterm it was 340 words. Quite a change! Last in the panel was Margo Wilson, "Writing a Future to Guarantee There Will Be a Writing Future." Her presentation talked about how she has her students do group oral presentations on what they learned in the course. They were given the option to do multimedia projects, but most chose not to. I was not suprised by this. As I pointed out during the Q & A, students will usually only challenge themselves when they are forced to do so. If you give them the option, they will tend to choose what's safest for them. It takes a special student to want a challenge.
After this session, I decided to take a break and head over to the Chicago Insitute of Arts and absorb some Impressionism. They had a whole room full of Rodins, Toulouse-Lautrec, and, of course, Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. I was also impressed by their collections of Chinese artifacts, Native American costumes, and African masks. I didn't have time to see much else. I grabbed a sandwich from 7-11 on my way back to the Palmer House (where I'm staying, and where most of my sessions were today). So then it was time for my 1:15 session.
My 1:15 session was called "Developing Digital Literacies: Writing the Future in Cyberspace." It was a display of lessons from a book called Lesson Plans for Developing Digital Literacies from NCTE Press (a book I've purchased fairly recently, and a book I obtained for the people in my teaching circle). It began with Neil Rigler, from an IL HS, who talked about using blogs in his classes and gave us a good handout with several project ideas for blogs. Next was Abigail Kennedy, who teaches at the Pasco eSchool. She discussed how she does podcasting with book reviews; we can use either Audacity or Podomatic to do podcasting (she mentioned that podcasts can sometimes have images, and I wasn't aware of this). Elizabeth Kenney talked about having her students do projects with Wikipedia.
From there I went to a session called "Real Teachers Need Real Tools." I was excited about this session because it promised three "teachers of the year" who were going to present "three rockin' lesson plans." Instead, Alan Sitomer (who was supposed to be chair of the session) gave a presentation that was more like a motivational speech. Sitomer is a charismatic speaker--I can understand why he's won awards--and I agree with his claim that "ultimately, it's all about writing." But I felt that we were also being asked to buy a product that he was promoting, so it somewhat rubbed me the wrong way. After Terry, a teacher from Wisconsin, began a presentation on digital storytelling, I made a quick exit.
I then took a shuttle to the Chicago Hilton--which for once was pretty quick. I had some time to kill before my 4:15 session, so I headed to the Exhibition Hall. I picked up a copy of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for $5 and a copy of Lucky Girl for free (note: I've been interested in this book for about a year now as a teaching possibility, so I was glad to run into it).
My 4:15 session was a roundtable on "Preparing English Teachers to Write the Future with Digital Literacy." There were five tables but I only had time to visit two, mostly because I got so much out of the first one! I enjoyed Rae Schipke's session on "Searching the Web, Writing the Future: Online Resources for English Teachers 2011." She mentioned about 20 sources for English teachers, most of which I had not heard of, and none of which I had used.
Here is a list of the sources she mentioned, and a brief description of what each source does:
http://portableapps.com/ (USB can run application. Settings and bookmarks can follow you everywhere.)
http://pdfforge.org/ (it's a .pdf creator, including .jpegs)
http://www.vcl.cc/ (media player)
http://www.magisto.com/ ("magical video editing" in a click!)
http://www.aol.com/av (Video chat by AOL)
http://www.caffein.tv/ (video chat room)
http://convore.com/ (chat app)
http://www.polleverywhere.com/ (polling--instant audience feedback)
http://www.swayable.com/ (choose one or other option--create argument/debate)
http://www.littlebirdtales.com/ ("capturing the voice of childhood")
http://www.corkboard.it/ (students can share how they all feel on a certain subject)
http://www.posterbee.com/ ("smart sharing for teams")
http://www.slidetaxx.com/ (social media slideshows)
http://www.webdoc.com/ (writing space--public or private--drag and drop with the web)
http://popplet.com/ (Idea platform, like flowcharts, clusters)
http://www.thumbscribes.com/ (creative writing space, works by genre)
http://www.tildee.com/ (tool for building tutorials)
http://en.educaplay.com/ (lesson plans, media plans)
http://app.socialmaestro.com/ (online class management tool)
I briefly went to another session called "Pre-Service Teacher Education and Social Networks." I didn't get too much out of this one, but I did learn a couple interesting facts from others. http://texedo.com/ (Word Cloud tool images) and recent study shows that, from 2009-2011, 5% of teachers consider themselves adept with technology. And the #1 technology used is....the overhead projector!!! How weird.
After this, I headed to Kitty O'Shea's for some fish and chips in the Hilton. Pretty good food, mediocre service. But the price was right.
I will likely attend a couple sessions tomorrow.
Later!!
PS--Later Julie Daniels told me about http://editminion.com/
(students can paste their text in a program that helps them edit.) Cool!!
This session was called "Writing the Future: Student Writing and Social Technologies." The first to speak was Chris Gerben from UM Ann Arbor. His presentation was called "Hidden on the Wall: Revealing the Collaborative Writing and Knowledge Construction Present on Facebook and Other Social Online Spaces." Mostly, it seemed, he focused on Facebook primarily. He argued that collaboration and knowledge construction does occur on Facebook, but he noted that some things are missing from it, including identity maintenace, responsibility, finality, ownership, and consensus (I have noticed that "finality" is an issue in Facebook projects, too). Then, Luke Vasileiou from LaGuardia CC talked about "Online Learning Communities: Applications for Composition Classrooms." Vasileiou works with blogs in his classrooms and he showed how students posted on blogs, commented on each other, and edited their own work. Sometimes the students were all in the same class, but sometimes students in one class would comment on the work of students in another class. One interesting point--the average English 101 post response at the beginning of the term was 230 words, but at midterm it was 340 words. Quite a change! Last in the panel was Margo Wilson, "Writing a Future to Guarantee There Will Be a Writing Future." Her presentation talked about how she has her students do group oral presentations on what they learned in the course. They were given the option to do multimedia projects, but most chose not to. I was not suprised by this. As I pointed out during the Q & A, students will usually only challenge themselves when they are forced to do so. If you give them the option, they will tend to choose what's safest for them. It takes a special student to want a challenge.
After this session, I decided to take a break and head over to the Chicago Insitute of Arts and absorb some Impressionism. They had a whole room full of Rodins, Toulouse-Lautrec, and, of course, Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. I was also impressed by their collections of Chinese artifacts, Native American costumes, and African masks. I didn't have time to see much else. I grabbed a sandwich from 7-11 on my way back to the Palmer House (where I'm staying, and where most of my sessions were today). So then it was time for my 1:15 session.
My 1:15 session was called "Developing Digital Literacies: Writing the Future in Cyberspace." It was a display of lessons from a book called Lesson Plans for Developing Digital Literacies from NCTE Press (a book I've purchased fairly recently, and a book I obtained for the people in my teaching circle). It began with Neil Rigler, from an IL HS, who talked about using blogs in his classes and gave us a good handout with several project ideas for blogs. Next was Abigail Kennedy, who teaches at the Pasco eSchool. She discussed how she does podcasting with book reviews; we can use either Audacity or Podomatic to do podcasting (she mentioned that podcasts can sometimes have images, and I wasn't aware of this). Elizabeth Kenney talked about having her students do projects with Wikipedia.
From there I went to a session called "Real Teachers Need Real Tools." I was excited about this session because it promised three "teachers of the year" who were going to present "three rockin' lesson plans." Instead, Alan Sitomer (who was supposed to be chair of the session) gave a presentation that was more like a motivational speech. Sitomer is a charismatic speaker--I can understand why he's won awards--and I agree with his claim that "ultimately, it's all about writing." But I felt that we were also being asked to buy a product that he was promoting, so it somewhat rubbed me the wrong way. After Terry, a teacher from Wisconsin, began a presentation on digital storytelling, I made a quick exit.
I then took a shuttle to the Chicago Hilton--which for once was pretty quick. I had some time to kill before my 4:15 session, so I headed to the Exhibition Hall. I picked up a copy of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God for $5 and a copy of Lucky Girl for free (note: I've been interested in this book for about a year now as a teaching possibility, so I was glad to run into it).
My 4:15 session was a roundtable on "Preparing English Teachers to Write the Future with Digital Literacy." There were five tables but I only had time to visit two, mostly because I got so much out of the first one! I enjoyed Rae Schipke's session on "Searching the Web, Writing the Future: Online Resources for English Teachers 2011." She mentioned about 20 sources for English teachers, most of which I had not heard of, and none of which I had used.
Here is a list of the sources she mentioned, and a brief description of what each source does:
http://portableapps.com/ (USB can run application. Settings and bookmarks can follow you everywhere.)
http://pdfforge.org/ (it's a .pdf creator, including .jpegs)
http://www.vcl.cc/ (media player)
http://www.magisto.com/ ("magical video editing" in a click!)
http://www.aol.com/av (Video chat by AOL)
http://www.caffein.tv/ (video chat room)
http://convore.com/ (chat app)
http://www.polleverywhere.com/ (polling--instant audience feedback)
http://www.swayable.com/ (choose one or other option--create argument/debate)
http://www.littlebirdtales.com/ ("capturing the voice of childhood")
http://www.corkboard.it/ (students can share how they all feel on a certain subject)
http://www.posterbee.com/ ("smart sharing for teams")
http://www.slidetaxx.com/ (social media slideshows)
http://www.webdoc.com/ (writing space--public or private--drag and drop with the web)
http://popplet.com/ (Idea platform, like flowcharts, clusters)
http://www.thumbscribes.com/ (creative writing space, works by genre)
http://www.tildee.com/ (tool for building tutorials)
http://en.educaplay.com/ (lesson plans, media plans)
http://app.socialmaestro.com/ (online class management tool)
I briefly went to another session called "Pre-Service Teacher Education and Social Networks." I didn't get too much out of this one, but I did learn a couple interesting facts from others. http://texedo.com/ (Word Cloud tool images) and recent study shows that, from 2009-2011, 5% of teachers consider themselves adept with technology. And the #1 technology used is....the overhead projector!!! How weird.
After this, I headed to Kitty O'Shea's for some fish and chips in the Hilton. Pretty good food, mediocre service. But the price was right.
I will likely attend a couple sessions tomorrow.
Later!!
PS--Later Julie Daniels told me about http://editminion.com/
(students can paste their text in a program that helps them edit.) Cool!!
Friday, November 18, 2011
Day #1: Mixed Success
Becuase I got in kind of late last night, I slept in this morning. After getting up, I headed on over to the Hilton Chicago. The shuttle bus seemed to take 30 minutes to get us there, but we finally did arrive. The first thing I did (after registering) was stroll around the exhibit areas. I noticed that they were selling $3 copies of American Born Chinese and the new graphic novel of Anne Frank. Pretty cool! I already have these, yes, but the price was certainly right. Maybe I will give them away as gifts. Anyway, they get me thinking about the possibility of teaching the Comics as Lit course sometime. Online, perhaps?
After my exhibition visit, I still managed to go to two sessions: one that was pretty helpful and one that was not. Let's start with the helpful one....
I read in the program that NCTE was having something called a "New Media Gallery" at this convention. I thought this sounded pretty cool. When I walked in the room, though, I just discovered a bunch of leftover handouts on different tables, and I was told by the only person in the room that the "New Media Gallery" was simply a fancy name for the "new media" strand of sessions that were taking place in that room all day. Hmmph. Disgruntled, I went down to a grab-and-go lunch place to grab a bite to eat before the session started. $10 for a ham sandwich and a 4 oz. Diet Coke. Ouch.
The session (beginning at 2:30) was called "Media Circles: Cooperative Learning for Media-Savvy Teachers." The basic purpose of the session (held by a mother-and-son team, oddly enough--she a middle school teacher and he a college instructor) was to show that the "literature circle" principle often used in high school classrooms could be used with new media texts as well. First we viewed a film clip. Then we viewed it again with a sheet in front of us--each of us sitting at a table had a different role to play with a different colored piece of paper. Mine was a blue sheet titled "Wordsmith"--I had to look for words that I ostensibly didn't know (or at least ones that'd be confusing to a student). Then all of us with blue sheets got together and compared responses. This way, collectively, we filled out larger lists. Then we reported back to our original group, where each of us shared something she or he noticed about the film. The categories included "Economist" (commenting on the economy of the time shown), "Fashion" (what people wore), and "Time Catcher" (noting things about the setting). We repeated this exercise again, but this time with a website. We were told to look a different webpages in front of us (laminated, for each of us at the table to examine). Again, we each had different roles--"Framer" (what was included? what was excluded?), "Demographer" (who's the audience), "Archeologist" (what needs to be uncovered--that was my role), and "Corrector" (what needs correcting). We all shared what we noticed/did not notice.
My conclusions from this activity--I think it might work particularly well for analyzing a small piece of text. But I'm wondering if it would work as well with whole novels, or whole movies. I'm not sure. Perhaps I will try it in my Short Novels course next term. Other interesting tidbits from this session:
Jennifer Meresman from Harold Washington College summarized her talk with three interesting points:
Jason Evans and Sarena Lee-Schott of Prairie State College then presented (I wonder if they remember me interviewing at Prairie State back in 2004--I doubt it!!). Evans talked about an interesting comma lesson that I think is worth noting. He'd give his students a passage with no commas, ask them (as a group) to fill them in, and then ask them why they chose the places for the commas that they did. From this he'd get them to construct on their own "the rules" of comma use. Interesting approach--I might try this. I also liked Lee-Schott's point about preferencing the term "underprepared" over "developmental." I think "underprepared" is probably more accurate, but "developmental" sounds a bit less....well, harsh. Can you imagine students saying, "Oh, I'm taking Underprepared English 101"? Don't think so. Still, for academic circles---perhaps among teachers--"underprepared" is a bit better to use. She pointed out these are students who've had reading comprehension problems, who've made their lack of reading/writing skills part of their basic identities, and their low socioeconomic status contributes to their "underpreparedness" as well.
Had a tasty dinner at the motel restaurant (Lockwood)....half a roast-chicken, sweet potato with pecans and marshmallows, crab salad, and a maple cheesecake. Yummmmmmm.
I hope to go to 4 sessions tomorrow. We shall see.
Later.
After my exhibition visit, I still managed to go to two sessions: one that was pretty helpful and one that was not. Let's start with the helpful one....
I read in the program that NCTE was having something called a "New Media Gallery" at this convention. I thought this sounded pretty cool. When I walked in the room, though, I just discovered a bunch of leftover handouts on different tables, and I was told by the only person in the room that the "New Media Gallery" was simply a fancy name for the "new media" strand of sessions that were taking place in that room all day. Hmmph. Disgruntled, I went down to a grab-and-go lunch place to grab a bite to eat before the session started. $10 for a ham sandwich and a 4 oz. Diet Coke. Ouch.
The session (beginning at 2:30) was called "Media Circles: Cooperative Learning for Media-Savvy Teachers." The basic purpose of the session (held by a mother-and-son team, oddly enough--she a middle school teacher and he a college instructor) was to show that the "literature circle" principle often used in high school classrooms could be used with new media texts as well. First we viewed a film clip. Then we viewed it again with a sheet in front of us--each of us sitting at a table had a different role to play with a different colored piece of paper. Mine was a blue sheet titled "Wordsmith"--I had to look for words that I ostensibly didn't know (or at least ones that'd be confusing to a student). Then all of us with blue sheets got together and compared responses. This way, collectively, we filled out larger lists. Then we reported back to our original group, where each of us shared something she or he noticed about the film. The categories included "Economist" (commenting on the economy of the time shown), "Fashion" (what people wore), and "Time Catcher" (noting things about the setting). We repeated this exercise again, but this time with a website. We were told to look a different webpages in front of us (laminated, for each of us at the table to examine). Again, we each had different roles--"Framer" (what was included? what was excluded?), "Demographer" (who's the audience), "Archeologist" (what needs to be uncovered--that was my role), and "Corrector" (what needs correcting). We all shared what we noticed/did not notice.
My conclusions from this activity--I think it might work particularly well for analyzing a small piece of text. But I'm wondering if it would work as well with whole novels, or whole movies. I'm not sure. Perhaps I will try it in my Short Novels course next term. Other interesting tidbits from this session:
- They talked about how YouTube is being censored in middle schools. Curious. It's weird that I don't often think of these things, being a college instructor.
- "Assume that a student's attention span is his or her age + 1 minute." Hmmm. Believable!
- For the new media circles, have the groups do a "group evaluation" form if they can't stay on task.
Jennifer Meresman from Harold Washington College summarized her talk with three interesting points:
- It's a breakthrough for developmental students to recognize when they're stuck.
- Struggle and challenge is a normal part of college reading.
- Students will come up with their own strategies towards reading that work for them.
Jason Evans and Sarena Lee-Schott of Prairie State College then presented (I wonder if they remember me interviewing at Prairie State back in 2004--I doubt it!!). Evans talked about an interesting comma lesson that I think is worth noting. He'd give his students a passage with no commas, ask them (as a group) to fill them in, and then ask them why they chose the places for the commas that they did. From this he'd get them to construct on their own "the rules" of comma use. Interesting approach--I might try this. I also liked Lee-Schott's point about preferencing the term "underprepared" over "developmental." I think "underprepared" is probably more accurate, but "developmental" sounds a bit less....well, harsh. Can you imagine students saying, "Oh, I'm taking Underprepared English 101"? Don't think so. Still, for academic circles---perhaps among teachers--"underprepared" is a bit better to use. She pointed out these are students who've had reading comprehension problems, who've made their lack of reading/writing skills part of their basic identities, and their low socioeconomic status contributes to their "underpreparedness" as well.
Had a tasty dinner at the motel restaurant (Lockwood)....half a roast-chicken, sweet potato with pecans and marshmallows, crab salad, and a maple cheesecake. Yummmmmmm.
I hope to go to 4 sessions tomorrow. We shall see.
Later.
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