NECC Day 2 - Monday, First session

Here's my wrap up of my first session at NECC from Monday.

I started out with a great session on Enabling Reading with 21st Century Skills with John Long and Debbie Svec. They had 6 ways to use technology through Digital Reading Portfolios, Graphic Organizers, Ipod/iread, Gaming Software, Podcasting, and Webchats. Not only was he a dynamic speaker, the examples he showed us of students using the technology spoke for itself.

With Digital Reading portfolios, Long captures students reading samples throughout the year, which he can store for authentic assessment. Some of the advantages he found by doing this was: Students try harder because they hear themselves and want to sound better. He said one student went home and practiced and came back saying he was determined to sound better than he did the day before; Parents like it because they can hear student improvement, If using ipod, you can put the recording straight into itunes and parents can hear from home, or you can burn a CD at the end of the year.

With graphic organizers, Long used Inspiration and Kidspiration in the normal ways of brainstorming and organizing thoughts, but he also used it for storyboarding for digital storytelling projects. I thought this was another inventive way to use this software and I would like to try it with any projects we do in Comic Life next year.

Svec's ipod and iread program is what interested me the most. In this program, students would check out the text version of a book and an ipod with the audio verison to read along with the text to enhance fluency. They were able to do this project through an initial grant and bought something like 200 ipod nanos. The kids only use it at home and check the ipods out when they leave school and back in, in the morning and the ipods charge during the day. In the length of time they have been doing this project only 1 pod was ever lost and the parent quickly replaced it. That's pretty good numbers! They buy the audio book versions off of itunes. One teacher asked, "What if the students don't pay attention to the audio" and Long explained that that may occur at first, but the students quickly use both as they find it better to understand the both the text and the audio.

With Gaming, Svec uses Cranium Core, an online program that has read alouds and games, and then they add discuss and defend groups, which allows the students to build their reading, writing and listening skills, adds an engagement factor, and resources to intervention strategy. One of the main aspects this program works with is main idea and author’s purpose. The presenters said that the students would actually begin arguing in class about author’s purpose with each other because they were so into it. It really allowed the students to have social interaction with each other and let them talk about the issues in the book. The price really can't be beat either; $365 a year for the entire school and it sounds like any book you read, you can use this program with it. I really want to check out this website and this program!

Then Long talked about podcasting. He's got three student teams that he has put together: 1) MOD Squad (Multimedia on Demand), which does digital storytelling and guides, 2) Tech Ambassadors, and 3) Team TLC. With the training he has done at their school, there are over 200 teacher websites, with over 900 podcasts from 2 years, and they get an average of 150,000 hits a week! Absolutely amazing stuff! One of the teachers he works with does a podcast a week, and throught their podcasting (this nearly broke my heart) a parent who is serving in Iraq and was able to hear his daughter and stay in contact with her. They showed three examples of student podcasting: !) Student who did a book review, but told the parts of the book that held the conflict, the resolution, etc. 2)Students did a promotional commercials for books. This example was Farenheit 451-imagine a world without books? And from there they created a story to get kids to read the book. 3) Students did Q&A sessions. One student acted as host, and another student who read the book and answers the questions. The student used anecdotes when answering and talked about how his life experiences are similar to those of the main character.

The last thing we looked at were web chats. One of the groups Svec worked with was a group she created called the GStar Girls, who asked one day how they could talk with the author of the book they had finished reading. By email, the teacher contacted the author and the girls got to use ichat to ask author questions. This could also probably be done with Skype. I've heard of a lot of people, including Oprah Winfrey who are using Skype to communicate.

Great session with lots of great ideas!