In a few weeks, I am off to Dublin, Ohio, for an exciting weekend event — the Dublin Literacy Conference. I have been asked by the wonderful folks over at A Year of Reading (Franki and Mary Lee) to come as a presenter, which is a great honor. And the event looks fantastic, too.
I like the conference tag line: “Celebrating 21st Century Literacy as part of our 21st Year Hosting the Conference.”
Presenters and speakers at the conference include Tim Tyson, Katie Van Sluys, and Ann Marie Corgill. Children’s authors in attendance will include Melissa Sweet, Patrick Carman, David J. Smith and Denise Fleming.
I’ll be doing sessions around digital picture books and using webcomics in the classroom. But I am most interested in a family session that runs at the conference for parents and their children. I offered to show how to create stopmotion movies.
Imagine my surprise (good surprise) when Franki mentions to me that about 150 people have signed up for that session, with about 2/3 of them being kids. Wow. Now, I need to think of ways that not only can I get info out to the crowd, but also get the crowd working on something that we can quickly make into a movie. I am leaning towards handing out Wiki Stix, having people make characters and then create a parade of strange people (the wikistix folks, not the participants) as a movie.
This will be an interesting experience, for sure.
Peace (in the stix),
Kevin