eMinutes 6/22/2010

After greeting one another and enjoying a delicious gourmet breakfast bagel bar, we all went to the computer lab at about 8:30 for Tracy to lead us in tech matters. After wrestling with the computers and dodging the gremlins in the lab, Tracy helped get everyone logged on to the network.

Tracy quickly refreshed our understanding of social bookmarking and Delicious.com. She walked us through her tags to show us how we can use Delicious.com to save sites we might want to play with later, creating our own “path in the forest” so we can explore the infinite number of tech toys available out there. We generated a list of things we might use Delicious for keeping track of, including resources we need to access later, things we might not want to have on our personal computers, and sites we need to use again. Tracy also brought to our attention that “tagging” a site publicly links to other public links, so you can see who has also tagged the same site you have and if you want to, you can look over what other sites they have tagged too. If you find that they have interests that align with your own, you can add them to your network so that you can check out what other tags they add as time goes by.

From 8:45 to 9:30, we all had work time in the computer lab. Suggestions from Tracy were that we use this time to create a delicious account and profile, gather research for our workshop, create tags, follow someone else and add our badges to our ISI Bio pages. We closed our Delicious session by adding more to our Delicious Possibilities page (which could obviously be endless…) and by checking out a few volunteers’ links. The Delicious Possibilities GoogleDoc can be accessed at:

http://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1F4dICDHytvr1IVfAb5AG0nG-vpvBKIAvBsPTO18614E

At 9:45, we reconvened in the Child Development Lab to do a fishbowl with Chris Hall’s inquiry draft. Julie and I (Kendra) were the respondents for Chris’s essay which is focused on interrogating the efficacy of Ecocomposition. Lots of feedback was given by the whole group, especially concerning the issue with anecdotal vs. empirical evidence and who the audience for the piece was/is. We then had a quick discussion about the incredible worth and useful flexibility of fishbowls.

After a 10 minute break, we worked on our learning logs and other private work (from 11:45-noon).

From 12:00-12:30 we ate lunch.

At 12:30, Shannon Mondor came to give us a presentation on “Tapping into Reading and Writing Connections.” After introducing herself and her idea (the interplay between reading and writing), we free-wrote about reading and writing techniques we use in our classes and challenges we have had with those techniques. We brainstormed these on white paper on the wall. Next, we each free-wrote about a childhood experience. We then each read a story out of three provided and discussed them in pairs. Then we did an activity where we read a piece of research and periodically stopped to free write our thoughts, thereby enacting a combination of reading and writing. In our large group discussion after, we all seemed to be in consensus that reading and writing should absolutely go together but that state standards and trends in elementary and secondary schools right now are making that difficult (to put it nicely). The takeaway message was that teachers should feel supported by this research ("Writing and Reading: Working Together" by Robert Tierney, Rebekah Caplan, Linnea Ehri, Mary Healy, and Mary Hurdlow) that shows that reading and writing can be effectively integrated in a way that will benefit students (no matter what the tests call or the administrators say). Also, fun is effective too.

From 2:00- 3:00 we had RWR time and Rachel directed us to join the NWPi and get aquainted with NWP’s eAnthology at: http://www.nwp.org/cs/ea/print/nwp_docs/ea/home.csp We signed the guest book and took a look at how the “Classroom Matters,” “A Day in the Life,” “Open Mic” sections work. We were all assigned to post and respond to one thing in the Open Mic section.

From 3:00-4:00 we had CRAT (Connecting Research, Application and Theory) talk.

It was an energizing and productive day.