Wednesday's Webinar Class

Today's webinar had a bit of a rough start. Getting my old computer to join the live webinar was not the easiest. I struggled with sound and visual but after a few minutes they came together to deliver the webinar. Throughout the lesson, my screen froze, and the audio became very delayed. Thankfully, I was with 3 other classmates and was able to listen in while watching my screen.

I did find the live webinar experience much different that a recorded version. It allowed for interactions with classmates, it was tactile, aurally, and visually pleasing which helped to keep me engaged. I enjoyed the pauses to check out videos (although this did overwhelm my computer haha). The webinar is a great way to deliver a lesson from a distance while maintaining versatility in representing the materials.

My take aways from the writing process webinar:

-it is an extremely long process! The mention of the editing/revision process really stuck with me as I have always had difficulty with getting students to perform this task. I see now that this is because there are multiple brain mechanisms being used for the task of editing. Any slip up in any step of the processes (for both reading and writing) would affect the final outcome or the task of revision. I find that students often don't see there mistakes, probably because they don't recognize them as mistakes which would relate back to the brain mechanisms.

-it's important to remember what we are evaluating.

-we need to foster flexible writing.

-we need to value all forms of response, writing or not.

-there is much value in the pre-writing process (the fine motor aspect) in order to reduce any stresses surrounding writing (how can someone focus on writing if they don't know how to pick up or hold a pencil.

-initiating, formulating, and organizing ideas

-Inspiration is a program that I use frequently for my own course work. I think it would be great for a student to use in the writing process.

-clicker 6 and clicker connect $25 each

-the mechanical tools were very interested especially the writing bird.

- word prediction software cowriter

Voice recognition-dragon and Siri (there is a free dragon app)

-start to finish books, high interest, low level

I will be checking out the following apps : co-writer, dragon, cricker sentences, and spell better. I would also like to further investigate the 'start to finish' books.

Overall, today's class was great. I particularly enjoyed being able to read the chat box. I think it provided a forum where people could voice their questions in a non vocal way.