Two milestones passed!

Since my last posting, I have passed two milestones, the State Writing Assessment and my CUE presentation.

My students completed the California State Writing Assessment for Seventh Graders! What a relief! I am excited to be able to turn class attention to some activities other than writing. We basically spent two months focusing entirely on writing prompts and grammar. Now, I feel like we can return to a more balanced curriculum.

I am also relieved to have my CUE VoiceThread presentation behind me. Here's a download link to the handouts on the CUE Community Forum. I am extremely grateful to everyone who came and supported me doing it and gave me positive feedback. Although I have presented before, I never had at CUE, so that was a new experience. I learned a lot! Unfortunately, I had major Internet and computer issues, and wasn't able to go through nearly as much material as I intended. Next time, I need to prepare by downloading all the material I am planning to demo so I can work offline if necessary. One of the great CUE sessions I attended was on screencasting by Robert Craven. I could make screencasts of my online demos as a backup if I have problems with my live demos.

As I always do at a conference, I came away invigorated with many wonderful ideas I want to apply in my work with my students. I am especially keen to apply some of the storytelling techniques I learned about in Steve Dembo's session on "Storytelling for the YouTube Generation." I have also been intrigued with his use of Prezi ever since I saw a video of his NECC presentation, but I haven't had time to try it. I plan to put that high on my "to do" list for my next presentation. I just need to find a session on how to make all the grading go away. :)

Getting Ready for CUE 2010 VoiceThread Presentation

CUE 2010 is just around the corner, so, along with preparing my students for the writing assessment, I have also been busy getting ready for my March 5 presentation on VoiceThread. I discovered VoiceThread in one of Joyce Valenza's blog postings back in 2008, and it is still one of my favorite Web 2.0 tools. If you are attending CUE in Palm Springs in March, please consider attending my session. Here's the shameless self-promotion "ad" I just recorded and uploaded to the CUE forum: