Conference+Review+(Bartley)

//Conference Review// Reading and Writing in a Decade of Standards (Eastern Michigan Writing Project)

Session 1: Using the Holocaust to teach Social Justice I didn’t really know what to expect when I walked in to the EMWP’s session about social justice. I was prepared to sit and listen to teachers talk about how to include issues of social justice in English classes. I was pleasantly surprised when there was a session about the Holocaust being offered. I have always been interested in the Holocaust and have loved reading literature that involves it. I was excited to hear what the speakers would have to say. In the session, I thought that Chelly Eifert and Jennifer Walsh did a good job talking about how they teach the Holocaust. I never got to read any Holocaust related material in school, but I can definitely see the value of including it in the curriculum. I really like the ideas that they presented about comparing the conditions in the time period to the conditions now to try and help students understand how and why people fell for the propaganda and malicious thoughts that the government was giving to them. This provides us with a valuable opportunity for students to examine media influence in their lives. It also provides an easy connection with their current lives and social media. I also really liked the use of what seems to me to be non-traditional literature about the Holocaust. I think that when a lot of language arts teachers go about teaching the Holocaust, they use //The Diary of Anne Frank// and don’t really think about other pieces to use. The poetry from //I Never Saw Another Butterfly// was good because it’s written by children that are closer to their own age. It is probably a lot more accessible to them than the diary or even the play of //Anne Frank//. We did an activity in the session that I would definitely do in my classroom that included dramatically interpreting the poem and presenting it for the class. I love activities like this because I think they really get students involved and active with the reading instead of being passive. The inclusion of the drawings also gives students a chance to form connections between the drawings and the poems. The idea of including survivor stories is definitely very appealing to me, also. I like that the //Echoes and Reflection// DVDs include survivor stories so that years from now students will still be able to learn from our history.

Session 2: Digital Portfolios After attending the first EMWP session, I was eager to go back, especially for this topic. For my ENGL 408 class, I did a project using Troy Hicks’ book about digital literacy, so I was excited to see how teachers had included the use of Web 2.0 tools in their classroom. While not wholly applicable to me, I loved the presentation that Erin Klein and Jason Tar did about using digital portfolios in elementary classrooms. I especially liked storybird.com. I think that this could be a resource even for my secondary classroom as a brainstorming activity or a writing warm up to get students’ ideas flowing. I also think that Google Docs are a very good thing to use in classrooms. This eliminates the need for students to have flash drives that they can lose and consequently lose a whole semester’s work. I really like how Skyline gives each student a portfolio website when they are freshman and this portfolio follows them throughout school. This can serve as a valuable tool in later English/Language Arts classes so students can assess how their writing has changed and reflect about it. This would also be a good tool for educators, as they would be able to get a feel for their students’ strengths and weaknesses before they even enter the classroom. Google Docs also has a neat feedback feature and revision history that allows students to work collaboratively using the same document and not have to be in the same room. This in turn allows teachers to assess how equally students did work on group projects. The idea of a portfolio has really evolved since the internet and other technology became more readily available to students and teachers. Portfolios are designed for students to write and then speak about what they wrote and tell about their process. They are designed to showcase growth and development throughout a single piece of writing or throughout a span of time. With the inclusion of technology, it is easier for students and teachers to keep work for longer periods of time (with a lot less physical space taken up). I felt that this conference was really valuable for me to learn about new, improved ways of including portfolio work in my classroom.