Our conference -- Hands on Literacy -- came off beautifully just over a month ago, with over 260 people attending, but it burned us committee members out so much that we have spent the rest of this term recovering.
In our de-brief we made many notes of things to improve on next time, the most important being: "start planning much earlier" -- like 18 months ahead of time. We really only started working on it in mid-August and it was held mid-November, so it was a miracle it all came off at all.
The use of technology to plan and present the conference was another area for improvement. Wiki and SurveyMonkey worked great for us, but not enough presenters took up the challenge to make their pages their own. Also need to go with online payment/registration, e.g., using something like EventBrite, next time. And in retrospect should have set up Google Group for the committee, rather than relying on just a Google Email account. Getting all committee members up to speed with chosen web 2.0 tools before crunch time is something else.
Several presenters have updated their wiki pages since the conference, including:
In our de-brief we made many notes of things to improve on next time, the most important being: "start planning much earlier" -- like 18 months ahead of time. We really only started working on it in mid-August and it was held mid-November, so it was a miracle it all came off at all.
The use of technology to plan and present the conference was another area for improvement. Wiki and SurveyMonkey worked great for us, but not enough presenters took up the challenge to make their pages their own. Also need to go with online payment/registration, e.g., using something like EventBrite, next time. And in retrospect should have set up Google Group for the committee, rather than relying on just a Google Email account. Getting all committee members up to speed with chosen web 2.0 tools before crunch time is something else.
Several presenters have updated their wiki pages since the conference, including:
- Marj Kirkland, the keynote speaker who also did workshop presentations on whole school literacy plans and literature circles -- her slideshows and her handouts are up on her wiki page;
- Genet Erickson Adam and Nicole Kutschenreuter, who did a workshop on Literacy in the Mathematics Classroom. See their wiki page for PDFs as well as a link to a list of books they used available online via WorldCat;
- Jan Stipek, who did a workshop on Using Free Voluntary Reading in Support of Mother Tongue Literacy, put a PDF of his presentation up on his page.