Peter Reynolds is now following me on Twitter. He also favorited my tweet raving about it and even wrote me back! I am in awe at the fact that he took the time to look at my twitter page and write me back. It goes to show that he is aware of who his followers/fans are.

The Dot is one of my favorite books to read to my students. I read it to my 3rd grade class during my internship and I also read it with my 1st graders. In 1st grade, after reading the book, the students were given a sheet of paper and were told to “make their mark”. I wanted them to be creative and draw or write whatever came to their mind at that exact moment. At the end, they made sure to sign it so that they claimed ownership of their work. These turned out really well and you can definitely tell which picture belonged to which student because it went along with their personality.

What is your favorite book?
What is your inspiration for writing?
Do you have a family?
How long does it take to publish a book?
How many other books have you written?

Ame was super impressed with their questions and she gave them some great responses. After each student got to ask their questions, Ame was kind enough to read us one of her favorite books! She read the picture book… Bark, George!

The students absolutely loved it! Not only did Ame take the time to read them this book but she read with such enthusiasm and character that it really brought the story to life!

Check out this website to read more about Ame Dyckman and her books! http://amedyckman.com/Books.html

Andrea’s keynote on Learn, Reflect, Share was phenomenal and she really did set the tone for the conference. She inspired me to be more CURIOUS and to be open to being more coachable. One thing I really enjoyed was the TodaysMeet. I was in ModelUN in high school and we did something similar where we were able to pass handwritten notes to other “countries” as a backchannel. This was definitely COOLER! It was nice to see that everyone was participating so much and that we were ALL engaged in the topics being discussed. I could see this being used during lessons!

The students have SO much potential… for example, I loved how Lily H participated during the last keynote.

Since I wasnt able to attend I was able to learn from those students who attended.  I also realized how important it is to reflect on what was learned and even what you shared. The more you do it, the easy it will come! I was glad that I was using Twitter throughout the conference and tweeting the information that I thought was important because I was able to go back later and make connections. Edjewcon helped me start building a network with other educators all over the world

Pam and I also had the opportunity to present at the conference this past weekend! At first we were a little hesitant but we are so glad that we took that leap! It went pretty well if you ask me… it was a full house:) We definitely make a great team! We were having some internet trouble at first and it prevented us from doing some things we had planned… but as teachers we had a plan B and we worked around the issues! Since we wanted it to be more of a discussion we allowed questions and had a lot of discussion. I am glad that we took this opportunity and presented at EdJEWcon because it was great practice and we were able to learn from others in our session as well. I hope to present more in the future

This is something that I pinned onto my Pinterest account. I use this link to help me suggest books to my 1st graders. I go with my students to Library every Tuesday and Thursday and I spend a lot of time encouraging them to check out books that get them excited about reading! These may be the Top 75 Books starring Mighty Girls… but I suggest them to the boys as well, since some of them are such classics.

Today… one of the parents left a comment on their student’s blog post about her favorite book. It was so cute to see her reaction to the comment. After reading it, she left a comment back for her mom. I only wish that I could have been able to do this when I was in elementary school. She was SO proud of her work and felt even better about it once she received immediate feedback from her mom.

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I am currently in the process of adding their PicCollage images to their blogfolios. They turned out GREAT!

Here is his latest TED lecture “The Child Driven Education”, where he speaks about ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ and his new experiments on SOLEs (2010).