#RIWP18

I’ve been going to the Rhode Island Writing Project since I was sixteen years old (only missing one because I could not get the day off from work). I have presented at them, worked on helping create pamphlets, and overall, just being apart of the Writing Project culture for five years. This year, however, was a whole new experience for me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was there to become an educator. I have known for a long time that I was going to be a teacher, but going to these conferences before was more of me going to talk to teachers about what their students need while I was a student. Now, it became my responsibility to listen, to become that educator who needed to listen about what student need now that I’m almost five years out of high school.

Troy Hicks actually followed me back on Twitter which is really awesome because after we’ve spent the time reading his book and actually hearing him speak, I feel like he’s sort of a superhero in the education world. He advocates for Digital Literacy like I haven’t seen anyone else and I really do respect him for that. In his Powerpoint, he had a really great quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan that says, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” I think this was a golden nugget that I’ve gotten from Troy Hicks and everything that we have read out of his books and from his keynote address at the conference. We talk all of the time about how the news is biased and how we can’t trust anything online. I think in order to be properly digital literate, you need to understand how to look out for facts online and as teachers who are advocates for digital literacy, that’s a conversation that we need to constantly have in the classroom.

Like everyone else, I attended two workshops, and both were really awesome and inspirational. I got a ton of different ideas of what I can use in the classroom. The first one I attended was called “Empowering Education” and it was basically all about how to dissect an essential question through group work. First, you would get an essential question and write your answer to the question by yourself. Then, you work with a partner and share out your reading. Next, underline and highlight the most important parts of your writing and then join with another group (no more than four or five students). From there, the students write a group essay sharing their best writing. For me, this assignment was something new and exciting for those days when you just have too big of a question that you want your students to try and answer. What better way to have them answer than to dissect and analyze together. My other workshop might not have been one for someone like me who is extremely familiar with social media. Basically, it was about how to integrate social media into the classroom and it was awesome to see how classrooms are already using blogs, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. to really learn about students and also make students comfortable with appropriately using social media for educational purposes. Overall, it was another successful RIWP in the books for me and I can’t wait to also attend next year!