Symposium #1

For the Symposium, I attended the main speaker, Nancy Frey, Dean Butler's "Little House" session, Patti Ward-Macguire's "21 Ways to Motivate Students", and a refresher course on white boards with two teachers from Del Rapids.

Nancy Frey is a high school teacher who has written several books. I was sure I had read at least one of them at some point. I thought she was interesting and had a lot of good points about Visual Literacy. This is a topic I thought I should stay away from. I like the concept a lot, but at my school, it would be considered as pandering to the kids who can't read text. But, as a former fifth grade teacher, I think it would be very beneficial to kids who are having a hard time with reading comprehension and higher level thinking. Another benefit for my own class at school would be that visual learning enables kids to learn about what they're going to read before they read it. That helps them with vocabulary and phonics simply because the text will seem more familiar to them. I'm sold on the idea and would like to use more visual ideas in my class. Selling the idea to my colleagues will be different.

The "Little House" session seemed to be more of a DVD sales opportunity for Mr. Dean Butler who played Almanzo in the original series. However, the 2nd graders and even early 3rd do a little with the Laura Ingalls-Wilder books, and Dean did a good job giving some background on the show and its characters. What left an impression on me was the excellent documentary he made on the original Almanzo Wilder. His DVD was very visually appealing and I think it would hold the kids' attention. I talked to him afterwards and was able to get an autograph, but that's just for fun!

The second session was on 21 Ways to Motivate Students (21st Century Skills) with Patti Ward-Macquire. She had a lot of great ways to use technology. I think her WIKI site has most of the information. She had to put a lot of materials together and share them in a short amount of time. The sites and techniques she had seemed motivating. I think in a 3rd grade classroom, I might have a hard time applying a lot of what she shared because of the time constraints. It was a lot of great information, and I figure I will use most of it myself to keep kids engaged.

The last session was on Promethean boards. I found this to be the most applicable for my classroom because we purchased white boards last year and have had minimal training. The ladies who shared were very excited. They showed both lower and upper level techniques. I didn't know some of those features shared were available! I found it very useful. I wish they would have written some things down too. They had a lot of great ideas for keeping kids engaged. They used a different interactive clicker than my school has. I will be working on getting my school involved with the type of clickers that can text. I love the idea of having kids being about to give digital answers.