04.23.10 eMinutes : Tracy

Roll Call: Chris Hall, Jessie Hobba, Rachel Davis, Stefanie Watson, Kendra Ross, Tracy Duckart, August Deshais, Kelly Smith, Jennifer Berube, Molly Wasko | Julie Lattka, Gina Campbell

Our Day

Morning Social (0830-0900)

Beverages, Bites, and Beckoning

Introductions (0900-0905)

Speed Dating (0905-0945)

• What is one current teaching challenge we face?
• What is our most embarrassing moment?
• What do we like most about teaching?
• What is our favorite or the best movie we’ve seen lately? 
• If we were in charge of our schools, what would we change?
• What would you like to say about our families? 

Break (0945-1000)

Workshop (1000-1115)

Stefanie Watson: “Teacher Research and Inquiry: Improving Writing Curriculum and Practice”

• Our Responses to the Article (Ruth Devlin’s article “Jeff Wilhelm: You Gotta BE a Teacher-Researcher”): Chris wanted specific examples. Molly loves the validation involved with Wilhelm’s embracing the community of teachers at school site. August enjoys and appreciates the value of the term “teacher-researcher” and the acknowledgement involved that we’re all, really, are teacher-researchers. Sue reminds us that what adds the “researcher” to “teacher-researcher” is the intentionality, the mindfulness, the willingness to reflect. Jennifer talks about one of the things that makes mindfulness difficult: the survival mode most new teachers feel: the not how did things go rather than what do I do next. Kendra mentions the importance of writing things down that was mentioned in the article: the way that writing helps us to focus and analyze.
• Challenges of Being a Teacher-Researcher: time, especially during the school year; maybe not hitting on the right question; finding the resources to help answer the questions; being an independent thinker in the age of the prescribed curriculum; more experienced colleagues might be less willing to reveal perceived fallibility; worries about how much we can generalize safely, about shelf life; deprofessionalization of the profession, teacher-proof curriculum, and how we can fly/operate in the face of this crap; how to diagnose success or failure (my fault, student issues, weather).
• Benefits: the time saved by putting a little time and energy in now to save time later; future expertise, of being seen as an expert and someone who has experience/knowledge/help to share; sense of community, the reinforcement that others can/do/have felt this before, too; inherent support in the researcher part, not just the teacher part; serendipity, or appreciating surprise or unexpected results; having the ammunition to explain and work against the prescribed curriculum, against teaching to the test, so improves confidence; alleviates fears of being revealed as a fraud (what Jane Tompkins calls “the pedagogy of the distressed”); tool kit building inherent in teaching and learning from other teachers, other practitioners.
• QuickWrite: start writing about what we might want to study this summer. If you get stuck, you can read one of the articles Stefanie has provided. Ideas for research: Collaborative writing, Peer response, Revision, Handwriting, Writing across the curriculum / in content areas, How much to focus on skills / content, Scaffolding, Writing and technology, Integrated science writing, Assignments for more real-student world, Teaching writing format, Keeping voice in writing, Mini-lessons, Support struggling writers, Student-teacher conferences, Online writing portfolios, Role of nature and inspiring writers, Building confidence, How to engage students, How to structure writing, Classroom management, Role of experiential education with improving student writing skills

Break (1115-1130)

Business (1130-1200) 

ISI Roster, Schedule, Learning Logs, Responsibilities, Committees

Lunch (1200-1230)

CRAT Talk (I1230-0130)
Angela Pascopelia and Will Richardson’s “The New Writing Pedagogy: Using Social Networking Tools to Keep up with Student Interests”
Here's What We Had to Say:

• Great resources. How many are blocked at our school sites?
• Jennifer shared two successful online projects she’s using with two tech-phobic Spanish teachers. Next year: blogs focusing on famous Latin personalities. All Google forums (Docs, Sites, Blogger)
• Social networking as “information science”
• Danger of the “extra work” perception, more that what’s required of the course: an addition rather than an improvement. How to avoid the busywork designation—both real busywork and the perception of busywork. The importance of making our outcomes transparent.
• Writing for an audience dramatically changes the writing landscape
• Sometimes tech resistance can be a really useful thing
• Exciting: more collaborative, less individualistic
• NCTE’s New Literacies: “the ability to ‘build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally,’ to ‘design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes,’ and to ‘create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts.’”
• A (probably now dated) article talks about the difference between digital immigrants and digital natives—and how even several years ago, digital natives could hear the accent of digital immigrants and, consequently, had difficulty translating.
• With tech projects, it’s awfully easy for tech-savvy friends to do the work, like inserting images, for less-capable or less-confident colleagues.
• Administrators need help understanding because they can get caught up in the negatives and/or exceptions like cyberBullying
• How much are elementary- and secondary-school teachers pushing technology by insisting the tech skills will be required in college? Or are college expectations drawing instruction/facilities from earlier education.
• Colleges expect so much tech savviness from its students: online registration, email accessibility, syllabi, handouts, etc.
• What, really, is the difference between teaching kids not to accept candy from strangers and how to guard against online predators?
• Kids are writing a lot more these days.
• And then there are—again—access issues. Hardware, software, and Internet access all cost money.
• Apparently, a lot of the CA tech standards are communicated to the librarians—and too many schools are cutting their librarians.
• Who is doing tech-based stuff in the classroom? What are you doing?
• Molly and Julie used Internet searches to help their students learn about rockets and other physics stuff; their students also availed themselves of the textbook’s companion website.
• Rachel is doing persuasive hero pieces, using GoogleDocs to draft, comment, revise. They’re making business cards for their person, too.
• Somewhere, at some school where students had unlimited access to MySpace and Facebook, students were spending so much time on their sites, they were choking bandwidth, slowing down everything else.
• Can we really multitask effectively, or are things like Facebook really draining us, distracting us and stealing work time?
• What kind of real tech or tech-supported work can be done with limited classroom resources like too few or too old computers?
• Facebook is adding a docs.com feature, creating a GoogleDocs-type communal authoring site/feature/place.

Workshop (0130-0245)

Tracy Duckart: "Harnessing Technology for the ISI"

Learning Logs (0300-0330)

QuickWrite and ShareOut (0330-0400)

Respectfully submitted by Tracy Duckart