A couple weekends ago, I was lucky enough to attend the International
Literacy Conference in St. Louis. I will be the first to admit that I
am a "total geek" and to me summers don't just mean time to relax and quality family time but
also time to improve my teaching so I can do
EVEN better next year. At the
conference, I picked up a ton of great information that I intend on
sharing over the next couple of weeks. It was so inspirational to hear speakers passionate
about teaching reading and writing like Stephanie Harvey and Jan Richardson.
I am so
thankful for all the tidbits of information that I pick up on a daily
basis from teacher blogs and I am pumped that I am finally organized enough to give back and spread some tidbits of my own. I picked up a great organizational idea before I left for the conference. I read that drafting blog posts in
Evernote helped with managing blogging efficiency. What is a genius idea! Why hadn't I thought of it before? So during the conference, I was able to take notes and enter photos under each session to make it easy to write a blog posts about the great reading ideas/info that I picked up . Plus it will give me a chance to review and rethink through the material again as well so it really is a total WIN, WIN.
At
the opening meeting for the conference, the president of ILA mentioned
the term "moon shot" which was a term coined by Google. This is an big
idea or goal that a person or people are trying to accomplish. For instance, the goal or "moon shot"
of the ILA is to wipe out illiteracy worldwide! I know right?? It is a huge undertaking but it is a goal that teachers play a huge part in everyday in classrooms around the world. Teachers are knee deep in the trenches fighting illiteracy. Teachers are faced with figuring out how to help that one reader who doesn't
seem to "get" it or the handful of students that believe that reading is BORING. Instead of GIVING UP when their class is tough or
the kids don't appear to be learning a single thing educators fight back and show their students that reading is a portal to another world.
I believe that as
educators, "moon shots" keep us going. The dreams that may appear
unobtainable that we have for our students. So as you begin you new
school year: What are your "moon shots" for the upcoming year? I know
that many of you have not met your students yet but what things that may
seem unobtainable do you want to accomplish with your class this year??
Stay tuned my first conference post will focus on dyslexia. I learned a couple of pretty interesting nuggets of information that I can't wait to share!
