Tech Is all the Talk at NCTE
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 11/24/2009
Educators from around the globe shared methods for tying media and technology into literacy lessons at the 99th annual National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Annual Convention held in Philadelphia, PA, November 19-22.From building their own multimedia projects, to learning how to apply new technology to teaching classic literature, K-12 educators, including librarians, found plenty of tech tips and tools to mine and explore during the four-day event entitled, “Once and Future Classics: Reading Between the Lines.”
Attendees took to Twitter, blogs, and other networking platforms to share their experiences. For those who could not make this year’s show many tutorials, links, and podcasts have been posted to NCTE’s Ning.
Among the highlights: The “Media Literacy Made Easy session” on Friday morning, where William Kist (pictured), author of The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age (Corwin Press, 2009) along with Jeff Share, a former photojournalist now with the University of California, Los Angeles, helped attendees create their own multimedia pieces by stitching sound effects and narration together with photographs and drawings.
Tips on how to craft similar kinds of visual assignments are available on the Ning.
Minutes after that session, conference goers ducked into “Connecting the Old to the New: Shedding Light on Teaching Technology to Crazed Adolescents,” where presenters described how to enliven so-called stuffy classics—by using handheld devices to teach great works. Later, Ian O’Byrne, from the University of Connecticut’s new literacy team, cohosted a segment on how to encourage students to do their own writing, particularly blogging, in a one-to-one computing environment.
Teachers looking for new ways to support students in their writing could also find help through the National Writing Project, which concurrently held its annual meeting with NCTE, culminating in a morning-long writing marathon Saturday.
As the fun ended Sunday and teachers started heading home, NCTE posted a tweet about NCTE 2010—a reminder that the deadline to submit a proposal for next year’s conference is right around the corner: Jan 20, 2010.
