LISD Ed Tech Connection

To help celebrate Reading Month and learning, the 3rd Annual LISD Author Visit occurred on Thursday, March 30th. This year’s author, brought to us by Gale Publishing’s Sleeping Bear Press, was Denise Brennan-Nelson author of well-known children’s books Someday is Not a Day of the Week and Buzzy the Bumblebee. Denise came to the Porter Education Center and delivered 4 sessions about writing and believing in yourself to hundreds of third grade students all around Lenawee County.

For the 3rd year in a row, Lenawee educators used technology to share the author’s message over the miles between districts. For each session, one class of third graders and their teacher came to Porter to be the in-house audience. (Classes were selected by democratically drawing school names out of a basket.) Sessions were also broadcast live over LISD’s Educational Access Channel 22 so that schools within the Comcast Cable area (Adrian, Madison, and Tecumseh Schools) could view the sessions as they were happening and email their questions to the Porter Center. Lastly, mobile video conferencing units were stationed around the county so that up to 2 school sites were interacting via live, two-way video and audio for any given session. Deerfield, Lenawee Christian, and Morenci Schools used the video conferencing units that they purchased, while Addison, Britton-Macon, Hudson, and Onsted Schools each borrowed one of LISD’s mobile units. Like in past years, Onsted Elementary took the incoming video and audio feed and pumped it through their school’s cable system which allowed for others classes to view the proceedings from their classrooms while the 3rd graders were in the media center with the video conferencing unit. Those students in their classroom email their questions to the Porter Center.

Early survey results indicate that the 2006 Author Visit was a success. 100% of the respondents felt the author visit was a valuable learning experience for students. All of the respondents would like continue having author visits in this way.

Educator comments:

• “Ms. Nelson’s ability to make all students feel involved in her visit. Our students felt as though they were in the same room with Ms. Nelson. Her positive feedback to students about the questions they had stated to her and making each one feel like they too could become good writers. Wonderful!!”
• “…heard great feedback from students.”
• “It was obvious she loved the students and connected with them very well.”

The technology we used…

• “was an excellent tool to make interaction happen.”
• “is awesome! We want more!”

Adrian’s local newspaper, the Daily Telegram, published an article about the event.

A teacher’s guide for Someday is Not a Day of the Week can be found at:
http://www.gale.com/pdf/TeachersGuides/SomedayGuide.pdf

~ Greg Marten, LISD Coordinator of Distance Learning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Educational Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.