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Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: Susan Veccia <svec@LOC.GOV>
Subject: Re: presenting AM with students
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This is a great story! It's like Eloise at the Plaza.....Thanks, Monica,
for sharing it with all of us. I wish I could have been there to have
heard the kids! Are there any funny or insightful kid remarks that you can
remember?
It also reminds me to remind all of you to go to the CCT website and update
your dissemination reports!!
http://www.edc.org/CCT/NDL/1999/followup/dissem.html
At 06:33 AM 3/20/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Has anyone else done conference or workshop presentations of American
>Memory with students? I decided to give it a try last week at the
>National Council of Teachers of English Spring Conference this past
>Thursday and was really pleased with the results. If you enjoy
>presenting, can do so without getting too anxious (and, thus, making the
>kids anxious), and are flexible I recommend it as a different way to get
>the word out about American Memory. What follows is how I went about
>doing this for anyone interested.
>
>Once my proposal was accepted for the conference last fall I contacted six
>kids from my last years' class, now fifth graders, and asked if they'd
>like to help me present. They all agree with great enthusiasm. After
>preparing the visual part of the presentation (a cold website with my unit
>and various American Memory pages that the kids had used) I met with them
>for a couple of hours after school one day (along with plenty of pizza and
>soda) and did a dry run. One of the kids' parents is our adminstrative
>tech person so he volunteered to manage the tech stuff for me and one of
>our librarians (a friend and very familiar with the project) helped as
>well.
>
>Last Thursday it was quite amusing to drive up to the Hilton's main
>entrance in a yellow school van and piled out with the door ever so
>politely held open for us by a porter (this is New York so we were next to
>quite a few limos!) I must admit I got quite a kick out of trooping
>through the exhibits and the hallways of the Hilton followed by my little
>crew with their backpacks and chatter. They got quite a few bemused looks
>and a few, "Why aren't you in school?"- type questions. At our session
>I briefly introduced myself and the kids, the American Memory Fellows
>Program and then just went through my unit (which begins with an
>introduction to the Library and the site) and had the kids talk about what
>they remembered, what they had learned, what they had did, problems
>encountered, etc. at each step of the unit. I made it VERY informal. I
>had the kids sit in front of the dais (although one was rather petulant
>when I told her, "No, you are NOT going to sit up there and use the
>microphone!") and speak as naturally as possible. I would asked them if
>they had something to say about a particular lesson I had described and
>they would raise their hands and I would call on them. I had worried that
>they might get scared with an audience, but they were terrific about
>talking. The audience wasn't too large (we were at the same time as a
>general session with Bill Moyers), the room was stifling, and the
>projector we had brought decided to go flowerchild on us and only
>projected psychedelic oranges and blues (next time, I VOW, overheads, my
>first instinct). Fortunately, I had brought their original collages along
>and we passed them around. The audience seemed to really find it
>interesting and the kids were thrilled. Bill Tally was the chair and
>summed things up beautifully. He may have some more comments to make
>about this.
>
>My main point though is that is that I urge everyone presenting this stuff
>to get the actual kids in to your presentations as much as you can. If
>you can't bring the kids then bring their work, videotape of them work,
>whatever helps people see the site USED by kids.
>
>So, has anyone else tried something similar?
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