Dublin Literacy Conference 2012 Slides

This weekend, I gave a session on Comprehension in a Digital Reading Workshop. Below are the slides from the session.Dublin Literacy Conference 2012

View more presentations from Franki22.

The handout included these reflective questions for teachers about our workshops. They are questions I am using to think about digital texts across workshop routines.

What role do digital texts have in your reading workshop?

Read Aloud

Do I choose to read aloud only texts from traditional books or do I share digital texts, audio books, blogs, etc. during read aloud?

Do we use web resources such as author websites and book trailers to help us dig deeper into the book we are reading?

Do I read aloud from websites and blogs?

Independent Reading/Reading Conferences

Do we use online resources for book previewing and book selection?

Do I limit students' independent reading to traditional books or do they have a variety of options for their reading time?  Do I place equal value on reading on e-readers, reading websites, etc. as I do on reading novels?

Do I help my students use online tools to support their lives as readers? Do I value annotation tools, bookmarking tools, RSS feeds, etc. as part of my readers lives? Do I model these tools in minilessons?

Do I introduce digital pieces and discuss digital reading when conferring with students.

Have I updated my reading interview to include questions about digital reading?

Reading and Writing Minilessons

Do I use digital texts or pieces when teaching minilessons?

Do I rely completely on traditional text or do I use film clips, blog entries, podcasts, etc. when planning minilessons?

Do I share process in my minilessons? Do I tend to share process only as it relates to creating text-based pieces?

Do I share my own writing process?  Composing in several types of media?

Shared Reading

Have I reflected on the resources I rely on for Shared Reading?

Do I include web reading and viewing when thinking about Shared Reading experiences?

How can I include a variety of texts for students to process through together?

Content Reading

Have I found sources for content reading that go beyond textbooks and traditional text?

Do I rely on newspapers for talk around current events or do I tend to focus more on sites like DOGONews and other sites that combine text and video?

How am I supporting the importance of visual information in the content areas?

What We Did At #Dublit12

by Hugh MacLeod at Gapingvoid.com

DUBLIN 20th Annual LITERACY CONFERENCE-Love how connected we are!

So, I went to hear Samantha Bennett talk about "Next Generation Workshop: Time for Students to Understand" on Saturday. The session was amazing. She helped me really think through the big understandings we want for our students. She talked about knowledge, skills/strategies and understandings. I worry that we have gotten away from planning for big understandings. I am thinking hard about what this means for the library and my own teaching. Planning for understanding is far different from planning for passing a test.

She said, "Understanding is the ability to think and act flexibly with what one know."

I have heard this quote before but she set it in a context of workshop and teaching that gave me some new thinking.

Katie at Creative Literacy was also in the session. She blogged about it earlier this week, sharing another of my favorite quotes.

"There's no such thing as the perfect lesson, the perfect day in school or the perfect teacher. For teachers and students alike, the goal is not perfection but persistence in the pursuit of understanding important things." (Tomlinson and McTighe)

Here's the best part--Seems that Laura at Pictures, Words and Wisdom read Katie's post and did her own reflecting from Bennett's talk. I SOOOO love that the 21st century tools allow this kind of connectedness and collaborative thinking.

If you have not read THAT WORKSHOP BOOK by Samantha Bennett, it is AMAZING! I plan to reread it now that I have some different ways to think about it after hearing her talk.

20th Annual Dublin Literacy Conference -- Barbara O'Connor

What's almost as much fun as a group of bloggers who come to the same conference?


A group of bloggers who finally get to meet one of their favorite authors...who is also a blogger!


I'm not sure if we were more excited to meet Barbara O'Connor, or for Barbara O'Connor was more excited to meet us! Let me tell you, there was a lot of hugging and squealing whichever way you look at it!

I had the great honor of being Barbara's personal assistant for the day. I got to hear how the book MISSING MAY by Cynthia Rylant changed her life. I learned that Loretta is her favorite character in her own book GREETINGS FROM NOWHERE. And I was treated to her reading from all of her books, especially her work in progress, which features a frog in a pot of soup and something that falls off a train -- but she's not telling what!

20th Annual Dublin Literacy Conference -- Grace Lin

The Friday before the conference, featured author Grace Lin was the visiting author at our school. Our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students were captivated by her presentation on her book A YEAR OF THE DOG. They loved getting all of the inside scoop on which parts came directly from her life and which parts were invented or changed.

And of course, they loved when it was time to
learn to draw a dog the way Pacy draws dogs
in the book.

You start with a 5, then add the top of the dog's
head and its ear.



After the neck comes the collar and tags,
the body, the tail, the spot and the bark!







The students all took their drawing lesson very
seriously!

They even learned to make some Chinese characters.
(Unless, like this girl, they can write in Japanese
and they already knew the characters!)



As a special treat when the dog drawing lesson
was over, Grace read a chapter from her new
book, WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON,
which comes out in June.

My special treat was getting an advanced copy of the
book from Grace the next day at the conference! I can't
wait to read it!


Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
by Grace Lin
Little, Brown Young Readers
June, 2009
Review copy compliments of the author

20th Annual Dublin Literacy Conference Series

Saturday's DUBLIN LITERACY CONFERENCE was great fun! So many great speakers and authors. This year was the 20th year for the conference. It is a conference planned by teachers in the Dublin City Schools. Between 600 and 800 teachers from around Ohio (and beyond) attend each year. This year's was another great year of learning and conversations.

Many of the concurrent sessions are run by classroom teachers, librarians, administrators, etc. We also hire keynote and featured speakers for many of the sessions. This year, we had 4 professional authors and 5 children's authors. Throughout the week, we will be sharing highlights, new books and new thinking from this year's conference.

I picked up Asma Mobin-Uddin's upcoming book A PARTY IN RAMADAN. A great book and so happy to have a copy. This is the story of Leena, who is invited to a party on the first day of Ramadan. The story takes us through Leena's day--fasting while at a party with friends. As a reader, I learned some of the things that are important about fasting on this day and what the day might be like for some children. A great story by a great author. This book is due out in spring. If you don't know her other books, MY NAME IS BILAL and THE BEST EID EVER, they are all great books --I can't keep the Eid book in the library. The author's website is also full of great resources--children's booklists, columns, information about author visits, and more. So glad I was able to get to know this author and her newest book!

Dublin Literacy Conference 2008

Saturday, February 23
+/- 700 teachers and librarians
8 great authors: Pam Munoz Ryan, Jenni Holm, Jennifer Roy, Melanie Watt, Sharon Taberski, Jen Allen, Aimee Buckner, and Terry Thompson

Lots of fun moments, but this was my favorite: I was doing my presentation on blogging. Approximately 1% of the conference attendees were in my session, most notably, Megan, from Read, Read, Read. Karen came in towards the end. Katie was at the conference, too, and of course, so was Franki. Small world, eh? It gets better.

My formal (if you can call it that) presentation was over and conversation had turned to tracking blog statistics. I went to SiteMeter. Just for fun, I showed them the world map view of the last hundred visitors to A Year of Reading. When our blog was new, I used to spend a lot of time poring over that map, wondering how someone in India or Australia had found our blog. It's been a long time since I looked at the map. As the cursor passed over the UK and the ID box for Glasgow popped up, I realized that I knew who that was! TadMack, you, too were at my presentation on Saturday. Now that's a small world!