July 7th Summary

CAWPers trickled in this morning to begin the day with coffee and conversation and found Room 102 changed. Instead of the familiar U-shaped configuration, the tables were split up and spread around the room for small group gathering. On one wall, the Composing Vocabulary poster offered points to remember when writing, such as using the "Happy Hook" to hook on to a previously mentioned idea and Tak(ing) OPPORTUNITY to Elaborate or tell more. Five other posters lined the window wall with topics for preliminary self-assessment using 1 to 10 ratings and descriptive smileys along the range.

Ronnie Davey & Donna Morrow introduced themselves and New Zealand with Ronnie’s performance of a traditional mehe (sp?) greeting in one of the country’s 3 languages, followed by anecdotes sprinkled with vocabulary and humor, and concluding with a wyata (sp?) duet. They also gave us gifts of Cadbury chocolate marshmallow fish and a shell apiece from the beach.

Using “Alliterative Adjectives,” we created a name web to help the newcomers (along with ourselves) remember our first names. See if you can match the following adjectives with their owners: resilient, rebellious, daring, resolved, hopeful, conscientious, death defying, just, crazy, teachable, jumbled, likable, complicated, attentive, relaxed R, wishful, joyful, magnificent forgetful, and pixilated.

Our first handout of the day asked us to rate ourselves according to the 5 topics that corresponded to the 5 charts on the wall. We placed orange dots on the charts to record our starting points; then used clickers and software that turned the results into a bar graph.

The next handout was a quiz that we privately scored to gauge our sensitivity to receiving criticism from our peer groups.

For our childhood memory piece, we received a “Write Stuff” handout of starter phrases with the direction to check a couple to get us thinking. Ruie told us not to forget to include smell in our descriptions and solicited ideas from the group about some family times we had been thinking about, reminding us that we can use “literary license” to condense these memories in a cohesive and coherent fashion. Ron pointed out that research on memoir writing shows that truth is perception and different people may have different views of the same event.

The handout on this “remembering childhood” assignment was accompanied by instructions to write hot today, which we did for at least an hour. There will be a guided revision exercise on Wednesday with sharing of first drafts in peer groups on Thursday. Focus should be on the peer response questions, which set up the rubric for this assignment.

The afternoon was devoted to technology. Donna’s presentation on “Education in the 21st Century” sparked a discussion of what students are experiencing inside and outside of school, particularly how they are processing information. The descriptor “digital” has been applied to various terms, including digital natives vs. digital immigrants, digital literacy vs. digital fluency. For a few moments our table groups considered Prinsky’s observation: "our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach" (2001). Among the points brought up were: 2nd & 3rd graders can do more than many adults, including their teachers; a creative environment is being done outside instead of inside school; and because we don't know what's coming, we have to teach our students how to learn, analyze, etc.

A circular diagram illustrated how speed/connectivity/intangibles (using & finding knowledge) are interrelated. And Donna made the distinction between the “read only” Web 1.0 and the “read/write” characteristic of today’s Web 2.0 and “cloud computing.” Examples of ways the Web is changing can be seen in the videos created by the PS22 kids on You Tube, the Early Childhood blog where parents can add comments, and the learning stories. For fun we should check out the JibJab program, and for creating and sharing understandings, there is VoiceThread, described as a visual podcast.

Some results of these emerging technologies are: students are authors and participants rather than observers, and expertise is distributed and shared rather than residing with a centralized expert and owned. Something to think about: how technology is changing what we do as educators.

Megan introduced us to the CAWP wiki under the Web 2.0 Info site so we could plan our Thursday brunch menu. There was a learning curve to surmount as only 1 person can edit a page at a time.

Then we were guided through setting up a Delicious account to save and share bookmarks. A handout supported this exercise, and we were shown the value of organization into tags as well as using bookmarklets with the various browsers.

Donna pointed out the daily blog, “Writing with Light,” and we were introduced to e-Writers to post the pieces we will write for class.

Finally, we were assigned and received the article “Unleashing Potential with Emerging Technologies” in a numbered folder to read for future discussion.