K-12 Online Conference: PD in Your PJs (Thing 29)

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a fan of anything that meets the following two conditions: 

1. It does not required me to get dressed in "real clothes."

2. It is free.

This week's "thing" met both of those requirements, and I also think it was a helpful resource that I will return to in the future. The K-12 Online Conference is a wealth of information, almost to the point of being overwhelming, but it's organized really easily and intuitively, and it was easy to find sessions that appealed to me. The summaries of each session and the supporting materials were helpful in choosing the sessions, and I like how each of them are sub-categorized into larger groups like "Overcoming Obstacles" and "Stories of Connection."

My first session was titled "Social Annotations: Collaborative Online Reading" from the 2015 "Stories of Connection" category. Here is the link to that page. A lot of things about just the title appealed to me. I want to continue to find ways to make my curriculum more social and inclusive; I have to teach annotation, but I don't want the notes to just live in the book; I like the idea of moving at least some of the reading online; I want my students to work together and with a larger audience. 

This PD session included three online annotation tools: Hypothes.is, NowComment, and LitGenius/BetaGenius. Paul Allison (@paulallison), the presenter, took the audience through the use of each of these tools, and I have to say that I am inspired to try at least one of them. I think NowComment might be the easiest to implement right away because it has several features that we try to incorporate into annotation already: clicking on the comment takes you right to the section that is being annotated; comments can be threaded so discussions are organic and each comment follows logically from the next; and you can sort comments by type (usually length - a sentence or a paragraph, for example). This is not to say that the other annotation tools didn't have these or similar things, just that NowComment seemed the most useable. 

One of the participants in this session also mentioned that he had used online annotation to start a conversation the next day about the reading. I liked this idea a lot because it showed that the online annotation wasn't meant to replace real-time discussion, just supplement it, and I'll definitely use it this year. When kids participate in this online annotation, it means that when they enter the classroom, they have already read the material AND thought about it enough to offer comments. This means they are coming into the discussion with at least partially developed ideas, and perhaps even having responded to a peer's comment, which should mean that they will feel more comfortable voicing those ideas in a discussion.

Another participant mentioned that we should remember that all of us, at some level, are still learning to read. This is a wonderful reminder for me! Given difficult enough material, everyone is a struggling reader, and he reminded me to remind my students that the difficulty and confusion should be seen as productive rather than something to be feared. I love this.

Paul ended by reminding us to "invite students to respond to the voices in their heads as well as the author's and generate a dialogue between these" and that students need to "learn to respond in ways that invited possible future readers to engage with them." He "keeps grounded in the pedagogy of annotation but uses multimodal tools (images, video, voice, hyperlinks) as well as writing." This session was a great one for me to view because it built on the things I learned at the Scholastic Reading Summit about independent reading being an avenue to teach some of the skills we are required to include. The availability of different texts at varying levels of content and complexity and the online tools are a great combination for teaching reading.

The second session that I chose was not as helpful to me but still had some good points. It was called "Meeting Parents and Students Where They Are" from the 2015 "Overcoming Obstacles" category. Here is a link to that page. I chose this session because I would like to make more of an effort to include parents in things going on in class beyond just emailing updates a few times a month (or trimester). 

   

This PD session was about using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flipboard to communicate with parents and students. There were a few things that I found helpful, such as the idea to make a class page or closed group on Facebook for parents to join and how to create your own Flipboard as an online magazine, but overall, there was not much new here. Perhaps I could have chosen better since I'm familiar with most of these social networking tools, but it was a good reminder for me to review the district's policy on what we can and cannot post regarding students online. I would love to have a class Instagram or Twitter, but they sometimes are less interesting without pictures. I've always assumed that we weren't allowed to post pictures of the students, so I should look into that. 

Josh Allen (@j_allen), the presenter, ended by talking about If This, Then That (IFTTT) and the "recipes" you can create in it to post to multiple social media accounts easily. That was really cool - I know it's been one of the "stretch" activities for this course before, but I never really looked into it. It seemed a natural part of this session, and if I can get more than one class account up and running, it will be very helpful.

Overall, I liked the fact that I could choose the sessions based on what I thought would work well in my own classroom. I loved that I could do it at home at my own pace, and I like that everything from every past conference is stored online. I'll definitely try to attend this year's conference!

P.S. I saw this session and decided against watching it because I think there will be a lot of crossover from this course to Dr. Rodgers' session, but I'm including it here because I think it will be a good reference and I'd like to revisit it.