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!!
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