I got my copy of Reading Today in the mail a couple of hours ago. There’s a front page story on questions that reading professionals should ask at their school about Response to Intervention (RTI). I found it encouraging because at my school we have pretty good answers for most of the questions.
The questions (my paraphrase) are:
- What is your school doing about RTI?
- What approach to RTI is your school taking?
- How are you monitoring student progress?
- What are we doing to ensure that the classroom instruction (which could prevent the need for intervention) is “increasingly effective.”
- What specific interventions do we have available for students and why are we using those interventions?
The
Reading Today piece has some useful tips for how to think about answers. If you’re not a member of the International Reading Association, find me and I’ll let you look at my copy of the newspaper…
I’ve been too busy with professional development (among other things) to blog about professional development much these last couple of weeks. So let’s summarize briefly…
I attended the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy (SETLA) in Charleston, WV from July 26 to the 30th. I got a new laptop out of the experience. I sat through a brief intro to Vista and learned (among other things) that it has its own screen capture tool (the Snipping Tool) built in. I attended a workshop on INTEL’s online classroom tools. And I spent a little while in a podcasting workshop.
There was lots of other stuff.
The podcasting is something I’ve put to immediate use. My page at the SETLA website has links to two podcasts on it, on one why life long learning is important in our society and one on something called cognitive dissonance. The podcasts are produced using a program called Audicity.
Learning to use a new technology often results in the need to learn more about other technologies. MY podcasts are part of a book student. I need to do at least six or eight more. And that presents some online storage problems. So I’m exploring ways to solve that through some kind of a webhosting service. Podcasts usually open in Window’s Media Player or in RealPlayer. Both can show pictures connected to an audio file. With commercial mp3 files, that’s usually an album cover. I can’t help but think there’s a way I can brand my podcasts with a logo or icon of some kind in that same way, but I haven’t figured it out yet…
Last week (July 26-30), I attended SETLA - the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy - in Charleston, WV. Three other professionals from my school district attended. Over 300 professionals (special education teachers, technology integration specialists, central office staff, and special education directors) were there to participate from across the state.
One of the things we did was live tweet the event. What does that mean? And why would we do that?
To "live tweet" an event means that you have your Twitter account open and you post comments (or "tweets," in the vernacular of Twitter users) as the event progresses. Probably you also employ a #hashtag in your tweets, a #word preceded with a number sign that informs Twitter that your post should be cataloged in its search engine under a particular topic.
Why? There are a couple of answers. First, it creates a background conversation where participates at an event can discuss a speaker's ideas or a workshop's content while things are actually happening (instead of later, when it's over). Second, it allows the outside world a glimpse of what's going on at the event. Third, it creates a permanent record of your thoughts that you (and others) can refer to later - like putting your notes on an event online. And final, I suppose it gives you something to do if you're a little hyperactive or you have a case of hypergraphia.
Hashtags only show up in a Twitter search for one week, so the #SETLA tag will disappear from the search engine over ther next few days. But the posts themselves can still be found by visiting the individual pages of event tweeters.
I counted about 400 posts using the #SETLA hashtag. In no particular, here's a list of the 17 event participates who used the tag:
WVTIS wasn't there, but commented on the event a couple of times and used the #hashtag. Keri Baldwin, a Kanahwa County algebra teacher used the tag to comment on the event, but I don't think she was actually there. Tracy Rosen, a Canadian teacher, blogger and friend of mine did the same.
Of course, that doesn't count individuals who commented on the event without using the #hashtag, like
- Jonathan Becker, Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Leadership, Virginia Commonwealth University
- Sally Boone, a WV technology integration specialist who was on vacation in Australia when the event started
- Angie Abbot another WV technology integration specialists in the state.
I think the live tweeting of #SETLA 2009 was a successful experiment for those involved in what can be done with Twitter. It will be interested to see how what we learned gets applied down the road at future events.
Perhaps the biggest lesson was that it helps to have the support of the event and to announce a hashtag for the event. Without that, most of our 17 participants wouldn't have known about each other... (Thanks, Val).
