Editor’s Note: This month we’re featuring previews of sessions from California State University’s upcoming ERWC Literacy Conference. Author and teacher Jen Roberts is presenting June 21 in Southern California and June 27 in Northern California.
By Jen Roberts
Do you remember how much fun it is to get to talk about teaching and learning with other teachers? In person? I had really genuinely forgotten how fantastic it is to get to be in a room with people who also care passionately about literacy education. The CATE conference in February of 2022 reawakened that spark for me and motivated me to submit sessions for not one, but two locations for this year’s ERWC Literacy Conference. I’ll be in Pomona and San Jose talking about leveraging digital tools, and I can’t wait.
The other night I began the more detailed planning for my session. I started by looking back at what I presented in 2019. Things are so different now. My perspective has shifted with regard to digital tools. In 2019 I was a supplicant, humbly displaying various digital tools and trying to make a gentle argument for adding some of them to your ERWC courses.
In 2022 I’m not making an argument. That would be preaching to the choir. You are already using digital tools. You’ve taught online, hybrid, hyflex, synchronously, and asynchronously. You’ve adapted, assisted, blended, designed, differentiated, implemented, flipped, personalized, planned, and transformed. You know the tools you use well, and you know that there are more out there to learn about. And, you now understand how effective many of them can be for supporting literacy instruction. You’ve built a digital version of your course, and now you want to make it even better.
So, let’s put our heads together, literally, in person. I’ll bring you everything I learned about teaching ERWC 3.0 in my Chromebook classroom with Canvas and Google, and a bunch of other useful tools. You bring your experience, successes, and questions. We will learn from each other, pool our resources, and go further together.
Jen Roberts is a National Board Certified high school English teacher. She has been teaching with 1:1 laptops for her students since 2008 and is the co-author of Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning. She tweets @JenRoberts1 and blogs at LitandTech.com. You can watch Jen’s webinar “Tools and Strategies for Moving ERWC Online” here.
Teaching ERWC 