Burned out by Conferences

I am ready to leave Conference City behind … but when I get home, I am right back into another literacy conference at my school. Oh well. This morning, we had a standing room-only crowd for our presentation at NCTE on Assigning and Assessing Digital Writing. There were about 100 people in the audience and they seemed to get a lot out of the conversations we had, which spring from our book Teaching the New Writing (and the publisher told us that they are about to head into the second printing of the book, which is very cool because that means people are using it as a resource).

My part of the presentation centered on a digital science picture book project with my students. I am embedding my prezi presentation here but you can also view resources and materials from our presentation at a Google Sites that we set up, instead of killing trees with too many handouts.

One thing we did was to have the audience view both the science book and listen to Dawn Reed’s students’ podcasts and come up with criteria for evaluating some digital media. Then, we looked at a third piece and tried to make sense of it based on some of that criteria. Our hope is that the process of coming up with ways to examine a piece of digital work from an assessment angle will help teachers.

From that session, we wandered over to the Teachers College Press booth to sign some books but no one asked me to sign their book there, so we just stood around, blocking traffic. I tried to grab some good book swag but I couldn’t find much. Where did all the free crap go?

Later, I did one of the NCTE Tech to Go sessions. My focus was on using webcomics and I had a nice little crowd. I showed them some options, some student samples and then had a few folks working on creating their own comics at the kiosk (Thanks, Stacey and Ruth!). It was a bit of a strange situation, with me standing there chatting with a computer monitor and folks just milling about. But I think I sparked some interest in a few teachers to try out a few sites.

Here is the Comic website that I created as a resource for folks. Use it and share it as you wish.

Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin