Promising Practices Conference

Even though I had to wake up early on a Saturday morning I was pretty excited about the conference. It was the first conference I I’ve ever been to. Arriving to the conference it was pretty empty but once 8 o’clock approached more and more people arrived. Right when I got my folder I immediately looked through and was glad to see I got my first picks.

My first workshop was Connie Horton: Digitally organizing your thoughts. I chose this workshop because a friend of mine said she had the presenter as a teacher and was very nice. The workshop was about using this program called Inspiration 8 to organize our ideas. I never heard of this program before and wasn’t really how it could be helpful. I could just go on word and make a chance BAM graphic organizer but this program was specifically for it. She even prepared a slide show for us to go along with our session. Usually I cringe over slide shows but I felt this was the most informative and useful one I’ve seen in a while. This program was so versatile you can basically use it for ANY subject. During the session we used Inspiration 8 to organize our “Sunday” which I at first I thought was pointless, Sunday, what do I need to organize for Sunday…turns out I forgot a lot was going on and using a web totally helped me straighten things out. This program is great for inside and outside of the classroom.

There are so many gadgets that you can play with, you can change the color, size, shape and style. You can virtually make any kind of chart, this is THE chart program, and the creating ability is endless. You can create Venn diagrams for math or English, webs for history and great graphic organizers for future students to plan their writing and your own. If you didn’t know all RIC computers have Inspiration 8 so if you’re curious about what this program is like check it out! I recommend on downloading the free  trail just to test it out, you never know you it could be your go to program for charts in the future.

My second work shop was Julie Horwitz Is it worth more than a Thousand words? : Photovoice as a self-study Research Tool. This work shop focus on a different method professional educator can go about teaching a topic through photo graphs and simply using your words to explain them. This was my favorite workshop. Not only did Ms. Horwitz speak about her current RIC students did as well.

PHOTOVOICE- A method to get ideas out; topic based on pictures.

This Work shop also had a Power point which intimidated me a bit but I was able to grab some main points from it. The influences of photo voice are mostly of the community, sharing and speaking from your own experience. Another main factor of it is a from a feminist theory have a voice. Just as Johnson would say “We must learn to say our words” with the use of a photo you can easily be explicit about the main topic of your photo.

GOING PUBLIC- Images and words created or put together in a created form and shared with a public Audience. This was another main point from the presentations.

When Horwit’s student went up to present their Photo voice projects, their topics were about Literacy in Rhode Island.

The first presenter took photographs of graffiti in a Hispanic area. In that neighborhood literacy was presented through art and culture. This made me think about my main connection to my SL project Collier. That art was honor their first language through their art which makes it a very important part of literacy. In the end all of the presenters made the same observations. Literacy is everywhere. You can apply this method again to any subject. For math have students take pictures of geometric shapes. For English have they take pictures that relate to a story you are reading. Also I good topic I thought of was health/social studies take pictures an issue or problem going on in your community. I truly believe that a picture is worth MORE than a thousand words.



More about Photovoice.