Blog Post #3

I am thoroughly enjoying reading the blogs I've subscribed to on my reader everyday, and I was pleasantly surprised when I ran across this post from Josh Stumpenhorst, the 2012 Illinois Teacher of the Year. Read below for his post and my response:

7/4/12

Expanding Students' Horizons

Recently, I had the distinct pleasure to model the new ISTE Ignite sessions at the kickoff session of the 2012 ISTE conference in San Diego. For those of you that don't know what an Ignite session is, it is a fast paced style of presenting. The speaker is given a set number of slides and a limited time on each slide. The presenter does not have control over the slides as they will change automatically when the time is up. For me, I had 15 slides and each slide was up for 15 seconds. It was a lot of fun and I can see this being a useful model even for students presenting in class.

Enjoy!

His Ignite presentation was included under the post on his site, and here's my response:

"Josh, congratulations on a very inspirational presentation, in such a concise and insightful package! I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how you have instilled Innovation Days to allow your students choice, independence, and self-made meaning within their learning. I especially appreciated the format of your presentation as I recently created my first Ignite-type Pecha Kucha for a graduate class and know how difficult it can be to concisely sum up all of the emotion and passion that goes into your everyday job of being a teacher. Although watching this format always leaves me wanting more, your presentation really gleaned the essentials from this topic, and for that I’m thankful! I plan to continue using this presentation format to force myself to be succinct and still powerful in my message. Thanks for this inspiration to keep trying!"

You can check it out here after Josh approves the comment, which he hopefully will! I hope that this resonates with you as well:)