NWP Nashville
Reflection
Nashville TN 2006
NWP Conference
Wow! What a learning experience especially when all my friends both locally and nationally were there to experience it with me.
The opening session Writing in the Digital Age is close to my heart as I have tried to help local teachers from our rural site experience this very concept through two open institutes 2005 and 2006. Having been selected as a Technology Initiative Seed Grant site Prairie Lands Writing Project (PLWP) had the monies to offer four mini open institutes. Several sites offered ideas about how they use technology to support writing. Paul Allison started the presentation by recording his comments to a podcast via his cell phone. Susan Artkras and Gary Ryan presented ideas of using technology in the elementary and secondary school. Others presented a multitude of ideas. Thursday’s afternoon session had four projects giving examples how technology plays a roll at their sites. It was a learning session even for the presenters. Prairie Lands Writing Project presented. Having viewed several great web sites the question was: “How can we make our website more interactive?” The general session on Friday was focused on the theme Writing for a Change. An added feature to that session was the rotating mike game. I was glad to see that even the experts were having technical difficulties and I didn’t have to worry about fixing them.
Friday opened with the Technology Liaison Workshops. I figure that this being only my second year at a national conference I would attend the Being and Becoming Technology Liaisons: An Orientation to the Annual Meeting. Upon entering Bonnie, Lynne, and I had plans to set together. Karen our mentor from the Tech Matters 06 Advanced Institute was leading the session and had other ideas for us. “Each of you needs to sit at a different table.” were her instructions. If Karen had confidence in us, then we went along with the next surprise. “You are going to be table leaders.” We learned that the life expectancy of a TL is three years. Karen said if you have no idea what your job is, ask your site director. Many of us that have been TLs for a couple of years are still struggling with what we can contribute to the site. Stories About Digital Storytelling: Tales of Inservice helped me understand that digital storytelling has a number of definitions. Karen, Pen, and Dave did a great job of demonstrating how each of their sites approached inservice about digital storytelling. Pen’s site provided a “kit” for participants in their inservice so that they did not have to go looking for the components of digital storytelling. Components such as sound, still images, as well as video were provided participants. They simply wrote their stories using some of the images on the “kit” CD. I am going to steal that idea when doing a DS inservice in the summer of 2007. There were too many great workshops and not enough time. My final session was The Social Web: Building Interactivity into Our Sites’ Websites provided a tremendous resource as our site goes about answering the question “How can we make our PLWP website more interactive?” I even got to met Bud the teacher. http://www.budtheteacher.com/wiki/index.php?title=NWP_2006_TL_Presentation_--_Troy_Hicks_%26_Bud_Hunt Site of information provided by the workshop on The Social Web-Building Interactivity into Our Site’s Website.
Thanks to Lynne many Tech Matters 06 participants met a Rachel’s for dinner. I am not so sure Lynne ever sat down to eat as all my pictures have her up visiting with one table or another. I got a chance to walk around on Saturday evening an take some pictures of the marvelous holiday season lighting displays at the Gaylord.
posted by Mary M @ 11/28/2006 07:51:00 AM
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