We were thrilled to participate in our sixth ISTE working together as a team. This year, #ISTE17 brought us from California to San Antonio, home of the Riverwalk and a pretty amazing #Edtechkaraoke showdown. We were selected to exhibit in the Startup Pavilion, which gave us the opportunity to talk to educators from all over the country (and world!) about the challenges they face when teaching writing. [A few people even remembered the Writemobile, which we parked outside the ISTE ’16 in Denver!]
Greg Garner (@classroom_tech) of the Friday Institute led a session of 150-200 educators, called “Rough Draft: Using Tech to Drive Connection in Writer’s Workshop” (photo above), where educators got to try writing and peer review in Writable, then think about how they’d apply Writable in genre-based writing in their classrooms.
Our big take-aways this year were:
- Writing is a process and teachers like to approach it that way, but it’s challenging!
- Good feedback cannot be emphasized enough in the path to better revision.
- Modeling, scaffolding and differentiation are important to meet every writer where they are.
- Guiding and targeting writing feedback helps teachers save time, so they can put more time back into their instruction.
- ISTE educators really have no fear, there is no limit to what they can do!
We hope to continue to see you in person at many educator gatherings this school year!
– Heidi & Natalie
