This Friday, I got the chance to go to my second educational conference this academic year, the MACUL conference in Detroit. It was very different than the MiWLA conference I attended in the fall, and I'm very happy I got the chance to attend both of them. While the MiWLA conference focused exclusively on teaching world languages, the MACUL conference focused on teaching with technology, in any academic discipline. I learned a great deal from the presenters I saw, and even got to contribute an idea of my own! I met amazing teachers currently working in the field, and got a glimpse inside of what goes on in their classrooms.
Some of the best advice I got before the conference was that it is ok to leave a session early if it doesn't seem to be the best fit for you - as long as you are subtle and courteous, people will understand. After all, one can only attend at most 5 sessions if you don't check out the Maker Space or vendor area, don't go out to eat, and don't spend time making connections with other educators from different schools.
The first session I arrived at was probably a great session for many attendees, but it just wasn't up my ally. So I snuck out and was able to catch the second half of another session which was completely different than what I'd been expecting. It was called "Crowdsourcing Content for Your Classroom and School," and was presented by Craig Steenstra. I had assumed that it would be about crowdsourcing with different teachers around the globe to get great realia for the classroom - a big deal in the World Languages department. Instead, the session focused on crowdsourcing content from your students! Mr. Steenstra showed us how you could create a blog on Blogger and set it so that anything emailed to an address you create would immediately become a post on the blog. Even better, you can set it so that everything emailed to that address becomes a draft for a post, so that you, as a teacher, can check for school-appropriate-ness before it goes live.
I would love to create a "Spanish in our community" blog with my students, and they could post every time they encounter Spanish in their community. This could really open students' eyes when they are in a very English-dominant setting, to realize that Spanish, and other languages as well, really are all around them! For an ESL class, rather than tracking how much English they encounter (which would be, of course, a lot), they could track when they encounter certain things we study in class, such as different tenses, vocabulary words, or my favorite, idioms. For more ideas from Mr. Steenstra, check out his website at craigsteenstra.com , or his presentation notes at j.mp/crowdit .
I attended three more very interesting sessions that day, which I will post about in part 2, and possibly part 3.
Some of the best advice I got before the conference was that it is ok to leave a session early if it doesn't seem to be the best fit for you - as long as you are subtle and courteous, people will understand. After all, one can only attend at most 5 sessions if you don't check out the Maker Space or vendor area, don't go out to eat, and don't spend time making connections with other educators from different schools.
The first session I arrived at was probably a great session for many attendees, but it just wasn't up my ally. So I snuck out and was able to catch the second half of another session which was completely different than what I'd been expecting. It was called "Crowdsourcing Content for Your Classroom and School," and was presented by Craig Steenstra. I had assumed that it would be about crowdsourcing with different teachers around the globe to get great realia for the classroom - a big deal in the World Languages department. Instead, the session focused on crowdsourcing content from your students! Mr. Steenstra showed us how you could create a blog on Blogger and set it so that anything emailed to an address you create would immediately become a post on the blog. Even better, you can set it so that everything emailed to that address becomes a draft for a post, so that you, as a teacher, can check for school-appropriate-ness before it goes live.
I would love to create a "Spanish in our community" blog with my students, and they could post every time they encounter Spanish in their community. This could really open students' eyes when they are in a very English-dominant setting, to realize that Spanish, and other languages as well, really are all around them! For an ESL class, rather than tracking how much English they encounter (which would be, of course, a lot), they could track when they encounter certain things we study in class, such as different tenses, vocabulary words, or my favorite, idioms. For more ideas from Mr. Steenstra, check out his website at craigsteenstra.com , or his presentation notes at j.mp/crowdit .
I attended three more very interesting sessions that day, which I will post about in part 2, and possibly part 3.
What an interesting idea! I've never heard of this feature before. I like how you envision using this feature as well. I think having students send an email when they encounter Spanish is a great way to make students pay attention to things around them. In chemistry, we're always stressing how "chemistry is all around us", so I wonder if using this same idea would help students realize just how true that statement is. Thanks for sharing, you'll have to show me how to do that sometime!
ReplyDeleteI would love to show you how to do it! I haven't set a crowdsourcing blog up yet, but I will show you once I've done it. I agree that it would work for chemistry, too - anything from cabbage juice pH indicators, to diffusion rates of tea in different temperature water, to baking soda and vinegar reactions... Can you tell it was my turn to clean the kitchen tonight?
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it's hard to think of a subject that wouldn't lend itself to this format. However, I do wonder about equity. Would this project make students without ready internet access feel left out of something their more technologically-connected classmates participate in?
What questions does this raise for you?
Hey Naomi! I really like the idea of creating this crowd-sourced blog; You could use this as a super way to create anonymous posts, or a running comment board for your classroom. I think it might also provide an ideal outlet for some students to get creative on their own time, as a kind of extra credit forum. This is awesome!
ReplyDelete