Cory and I presented our History Firsthand curriculum at a large reading co=
nference at Fordham University last Friday.  It is sponsored by the local R=
eading Council, an affiliate of the Internation Reading Association and was=
 attended by hundreds of New York City public school teachers.  The present=
ations tend to focus on specific methods to teach reading.  In order to mak=
e our project connect I titled it: Reading On-Line and then described our p=
resentation as being about teaching research to upper elementary students u=
tilizing the Library of Congress's Internet American Memory Collection. We =
were the only computer related presentation on the program. =20


We had already presented the program at a PTA meeting at our school so we d=
ecided to do something similiar.  I began by describing our environment and=
 the genesis of the project. I assured our listeners that our children had =
a range of skills, by no means did the fact that we did this in an independ=
ent school mean that it was out of the reach of public school students.  I =
gave an overview of the Dalton School fourth grade curriculum, Cory's goals=
 for information literacy in the library, and how we worked together to cre=
ate the curriculum.  Next, together we presented the actual curriculum and =
how it worked as we taught it, problems and all.  For example, the first se=
ction of Part III of the curriculum involves our having downloaded three of=
 the Early American films. Well...we were unable to do that.  It turns out =
that each film takes hours to download=21  We didn't have that sort of time=
 so had to skip the first section and move right to the second.  However, w=
e spoke about our plans for the films and how we still hope to make them pa=
rt of the curriculum once we figure out a way to download them realisticall=
y.  We spoke about the sorts of things that happened that we hadn't expecte=
d with the children, how we plan to revise the curriculum in response.  We =
aren't yet done with the curriculum (will be, hopefully, by the end of the =
month) and spoke about our plans for the end. =20

Cory had prepared some stuff on a disk and brought along a Powerbook and pr=
oject . He was able to show the curriculum with links, some of the American=
 Memory pages that we are using so they could see how it all worked.

It seemed to go well. Teachers were interested and took down the addresses =
of American Memory and our site. =20

Cory and I both enjoy speaking before groups and were able to trade back an=
d forth comfortably .  We'd originally planned that I'd speak first and the=
n Cory, but it turned out to be better to mix our talk.  I did take the lea=
d, because our audience were classroom teachers and I wanted them to relate=
d to me and then to the project. =20

It was fun=21

Monica

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