The ASCD annual conference has come and gone, and the Digital Language Arts team was proud to have connected with so many educators in our two presentations. It was inspiring to hear comments from so many people that are attempting to redefine their schools as places of exploration, innovation, and meaningful learning. We were also happy to engage in discussions concerning reading and writing instruction with educators from South America and Europe. There are innovative approaches to technology integration occurring all over the world, and yet we all share a common theme – engage students with relevant and authentic experiences and they’ll give you their all. Lastly, our very own team member, Nicole Sneddon, was recognized as one of ASCD’s Outstanding Young Educator honorees.
The Digital Language Arts team will be presenting at the upcoming ASCD annual conference in Orlando, Florida, and we greatly look forward to connecting with so many educators from around the country. On Saturday, March 14th we will present 21st Century School Transformation: An Approach for Leaders from 4pm to 5pm. We will offer a mix of theory, discussion, and personal stories from our own public school experiences in an attempt to engage the audience with notions of meaningful school transformations. This session will be audio-recorded to be made available after the conference. And on Monday, March 16th we will present Digital Language Arts: A 21st Century Approach to Instruction from 12:30pm to 1:30pm. In this session we will offer a practical guide to the meaningful integration of technology into the teaching of reading and writing at the upper elementary level (or middle or high, too!) This will be a ticketed session.
The Digital Language Arts team loved meeting many of you at FETC in Orlando. We heard from several educators interested in bringing more technology integration into their language arts classrooms, as well as from those already experimenting with various instructional technology tools. And we’re doubly-glad that many of you took the opportunity to visit the Oracle Education Foundation (ThinkQuest) and Intel (Intel Thinking Tools) in the vendor area after hearing how much we love their free learning tools and how much of an important role they can play in forward-thinking instruction. Special thanks goes out to Darcie P from northern Virginia who mentioned our session on her blog, jrichardson from Alabama who wrote about us in his wiki, and Nicholas Kapetanis in Florida who featured us on the Academy at the Lakes wetpaint site. Web 2.0 shrinks the world!
Next up? We’ll feature a multi-part series on the digital language arts process, and then we’re off to Orlando again to present a ticketed session and a podcasted session at ASCD’s annual conference. Hope to see you there!
The Digital Language Arts team will be presenting at the upcoming FETC conference in Orlando, Florida! Stop by our presentation room at 2:50 on January 23rd for Digital Language Arts: A 21st Century Approach to Instruction. We look forward to engaging educators from across the country as we share ideas for transforming traditional reading and writing instruction into a digitally-native learning process.
Recently our team participated in the Newport News Public Schools International Conference here in Newport News, Virginia. As part of the planning and implementation committee, we can say that putting on one’s own learning conference, in this case for 400+ educators, is hard! Who knew? We have a newly-found admiration for organizations that manage to put on conferences for thousands of people!
We were fortunate enough to be able to interact with our district colleagues by presenting various sessions, including discussions on how to use SharePoint as a tool for highly-effective faculty and staff collaboration, what school leadership in the 21st century may, could, or should look like, and how various technological tools can be leveraged in language arts classrooms to provide students with more effective learning opportunities.
The conference also featured facilitated discussion groups around ten (or twelve, depending on how you look at it!) things that every 21st century educator should focus on – things like digital literacy, economic literacy, global awareness, and so on. What was so great about those groups? There were no PowerPoint slides, no lectures, no sit-and-get processes – just groups of educators talking to each other about what 21st century education should look like. (And forgive me for saying, but I am always humbly amused by the fact that we talk about becoming 21st century educators… nearly a decade after the century started! Too funny!)
Conferences | James Maxlow | 
March 23, 2009 12:49 pm | 
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