Wait, Can You Repeat That?

After the recent days of SLCs, attending a few K12 online conferences in my pjs was a welcome diversion.

It’s not that I don’t like meeting with kids and parents. It is that I would just much rather do it in my pjs (really, it’s that simple).

The title and description for the first online conference I attended is below (as taken from the K12online conference link).

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=311

Presentation Title: “Promise into Practice: What it Now Means to Teach Adolescent Readers”
Description: It is a daunting and exciting time to teach English – especially as we consider the “shifts” in how we define literacy, and the toolset for our work as readers and writers continually expands. This session investigates one teacher’s work in studying her practice and students’ learning when she worked to bridge new literacies into “traditional” classroom practice.

The main focus of this presentation was on how a teacher integrated modern technology into her English classroom to improve student literacy, as well as her own understanding of said literacy. Some of the techniques she used are things I’ve tried with my students such as podcasting book reviews and completing multi-media writing assignments; I found her results helped validate my own thoughts on how imperative technology is to the 21st century learner.

This conference also addresses the ever-changing literacy landscape and poses critical questions all teachers of literature should ponder. What is important for students to learn about literacy? How long can schools continue as mainly text-based, when there are numerous other modes of literacy that students not only encounter, but are proficient in, on a daily basis?

The second conference I attended delved into the world of delicious things. I chose this as a follow up to our previous week’s tasks in the hope that it would enlighten me further on the joys of all things tagging, tag clouding, tag clustering, etcetering…here’s the title, description and link:

Presentation Title: “I Like Delicious Things: An Introduction to Tagging and Folksonomies”
Description: Using simple examples from a number of tag-driven websites, this presentation looks at how tagging and the subsequent creation of folksonomies are changing the way we think about information. Starting with obvious tagging systems used on sites like Flickr and Delicious, it examines how tagging enables information to be classified, sorted and managed in ways that make it more accessible, easier to manage and more self-aware. It also explores how tags can be aggregated across large collections of information to provide a snapshot into the overall zeitgeist of collective thinking.

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=273

This second conference was definitely worthwhile for me, as I’m somewhat of a newbie at delicious and diigo. If you’re looking for a presentation that will show you the various layers/methods/categories of tagging on sights as varied as flikr, delicious, twitter, etc, watch this one.

One thing I hadn’t considered before in regards to tagging is something that’s actually quite simple. The presenter shows flikr and how people create “out of the box” tags for photos they deem particularly special, powerful, etc. Tags like, “wow!”, or “I can’t believe I got a second chance” never even crossed my mind as possibilities. Now I’m on the hunt for such wonders and oddities and will even create a few of my own. This way of tagging/searching for photos will also benefit my search for unique photos to represent my student’s vocabulary words.

I think I’ll try a tag search of “I cannot believe I just did that!”. Wonder if I’ll get anything relevant to The Call of the Wild.

One never knows.