I Found My Teaching Home

I just spent four days with seventeen other people.  We are all teachers, writers and women.  The days were long, twelve hours minimum, but the bonding was once again amazing.  I don’t know what the magic is–shared experience, writing about yourself, the type of people who choose to come or a combination of all of those.  We will be spending three more weeks togehter writing, discussing, researching and demonstrating.  We will learn more about teaching, writing, each other and most importantly to most ourselves.  I am happy to once again be on this journey called Summer Institute.  No one who has never participated can truly understand the life changing experience of this workshop.  Every year it’s a little different, but every year I see countless rewards for myself and for those who come to participate for the first time.

It is time for our third day of technology training at FSU.  This year I have a team of people helping to put it together and to facilitate.  We, the tech team, are in our infancy stage having only met for the first time in April.  We spent the last two days working together to finalize the plans for today and to begin defining ourselves as a team.  We also did exploration in areas of individual interest.  We found time to explore JingProject, Blabberize, and few othe new fun things.  We will continue our work together over the near (and hopefully far) future to support each other and our fellow teachers.

Thank you all for particpating in Technology Day.  Let us know what you need, how we can help and what you thought of our presentations.  As part of the Crossroads Writing Project our “mission is to promote exemplary instruction of writing by impowering teachers as writers, reseachers and leaders.”  We hope we have been helpful.

Today we began our first (annual) Advanced Institute for Technology at CWP.   It is an exciting day for me, because the idea was spawned in July last year at Technology Matters, an NWP event.  We, Sonja and I, flew to California for this fabulous training.  While there we were coached, challenged and supported.  I found out that what we at CWP had been working on was indeed cutting edge.  Our inservice offerings, our Tech Day and many of the applications we were exploring were all cutting edge.  We were truly leading the way…not trailing behind. 

At this event I began to realize that it wasn’t that we were behind (because as I just said we were definitely not), but that I couldn’t do it all myself.  I realized the problem was that one person can not be expected to  lead, support and troubleshoot for an entire Writing Project Site.  It takes a team of people to do all of those things. So…I started to brainstorm with Sonja about how we could make this team come to life.  We decided that an advanced institute would be a good way to start.