At the CUE Conference I presented two sessions, my favorite was “Digital CPR: Bringing Your Reading Series to Life with Digital Video Podcasting.”

I opened the session with “Camouflage Jones, Private Investigator” which is one of my more successful classroom movies in terms of balancing curricular demands and cinematic concerns. I must say it was the best audience the movie ever had as they laughed in all the right places.

I then gave nine ideas for video podcast projects which you can find on the hand out.

Rather than just giving a list, I provided examples of each kind of project and interspersed the ideas with information on how to plan projects given the restraints of a standardized curriculum, namely time management, classroom management, and effective planning. You can see a PDF version of my Keynote Presentation here though the movie examples can only be seen at http://www.videointheclassroom.com

I placed barriers to using the technology early in the presentation to address what I believed teachers concerns were before they came up. I like telling people that I’ve worked in a one computer classroom to show that technology can be still be integrated even with limited resources and equipment.

Audience response was good. I know a few participants wanted more technical information on how to create a podcast and I think I will include that next time. However, I believe that is the easy part and can be found through a simple Google search. My goal of the workshop was to show how the video production could directly be applied to the classroom instruction already going on rather than simply be another tool that we’d use if only we had time.

I’m thankful that a few people blogged about the session. (Incidentally, being blogged about is a new experience for me. As a literacy coach, you never have your session on vocabulary development written about and reflected on). I think their posts about the session are more meaningful than anything I can say about it.

Please see these posts:

• Alice Mercer (who posted about every session she visited and single handedly doubled my conference experience)
• Jose Rodriguez (who live-blogged the session, kinda cool)
  
• Gail Desler very succinctly got at the essence of the presentation as well as others she visited
• Messier (who I don’t know, but I like)