Summer Institute Day #3 Reflection

So we started the day with a little bit of enemy-protector to get the writing juices flowing and to remember how we need to cognizant of each other as we populate this space.  This morning's demos where great!  Stephanie introduced me to two new forms of technology that I definitely plan to use in my classroom.  I knew about Glogster but I had never seen it used as an instructional tool, so I can see how I can use it to teach as help my students use it as a performance task for a lesson or unit project.  Also, the Storify website was amazing and I can think of a number of ways to use it with my students to understand how history is a story that can be told from many different perspectives.  Melissa's demo on creating student social advocates was very insightful and helped me to began brainstorming a end of the year project around social advocacy.  I love how she used student writing as master texts to model the type of work students can do to create awareness and change.  After lunch we tackled writing groups as a concept and activity. I think that it is intresting and intinmidating to bring other people into the writing process with you.  I think it is like blogging but an activity that takes place in real-time!  As I watched Lil, Lacy, and Sally model how writing groups work I couldn't help but feel intimidated by the thought of engaging in writing groups with my groupmembers.  I kept wondering how authentic are the responses and the feedback going to be?  However, I liked the fact that there are some norms established up front to organize how the group should function as we give feedback to each other.   Working with my writing group on Aileen's poem from the Murray Cards activity was safe and felt easy-going.  I would be interested to know how she felt since it was her work being reviewed.  Using the writing group through google docs was fascinating as well because it gave the group a chance to dialogue about Aileen's work without conferencing face to face.  I could see it being a great tool to use with my students to have writing groups to discuss a paper they may be working on for class.  For the second half of the writing group activity my group members gave me some feedback about my Murray Card narrative and it was actually inspiring and reaffirming to hear their feedback about my work in progress.  Now I feel like I have some things to help expand my work and make it more organized for future publication.  Day #3 is over and I am looking forward to tomorrow and the exciting workshops, especially the socratic seminar workshop