Traveling to Chicago for the 2011 Annual National Writing Project (NWP) and National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) Conferences was not in my budget this year, so I was delighted by the opportunity to attend three four sessions virtually:
- Andrea Zellner’s NWP Hackjam session – Thanks to tweets from Paul Oh and others and an excellent blog post by Lindy Johnson, I too look forward to more shared discussions around “designing meaningful digital literacy learning experiences” for students.
- Linda Darling-Hammond’s Friday NCTE Keynote Address – Thanks to Google Docs and Andrea Zellner’s lightning fast typing, I really felt as though I were sitting in the General Session.
- Reports from Cyberspace – Thanks to all resources being posted to the session wiki, including the slideshow and a live recording to this session, I was able to join Troy Hicks, Sara Kjader, and Bud Hunt (“three of the biggest ‘cyberspace superheroes'” ever) from start to finish, with the option of hitting the reply button:-)
Whoohoo, just found/attended a 4th great NCTE session, thanks to a link from Paul Allison:
- NcTE 2011 Open Education, Digital Resources, Sharing, and New Literacies – I’ll be adding the link to this well-organized, content-rich Conference wiki to resources I’m collecting for a digital citizenship project. If you don’t go any farther than watching Karen Fasimpaur’s slideshow below, you’ll already have gleaned a gem. And she has a ton of more OER resources organized in her OER LiveBinder.
As much as I would have loved to have joined these three four sessions in real time, I really appreciated having access to the next best thing: virtual attendance. And, of course, the upside is that I woke up this morning, already home, ready to start the Thanksgiving prep routine, minus the usual NWP/NCTE conference jet lag;-).
2011 NWP~NCTE Annual Conference – one more huge thing to be thankful for!