Mentoring Happens!

On Saturday October 29, 2011 I had the incredible opportunity to spend the day at the Orange County Reading Association’s  Annual Fall Conference. This was the 48th year that this event was held and the setting was at Concordia University in Irvine California.

I also had the honor to present for this event, sharing with the wonderful team of OCRA coordinators and more importantly the attendees, new and pre-service teachers, who filled my room to capacity in the two 50 min presentation slots I was assigned.

For this conference, I choose to create a Prezi that I based on one of my recent well received posts on Edutopia.org to celebrate their 20th year anniversary called 20 Tidbits for New Teachers. It was also featured at the Huffington Post.

It was great to see eager and excited future educators, interested in the ideas that I shared. They were particularly fascinated by the idea of the use of Web 2.0 tools to support their instructional work with students and the use of Social Media to support their professional development. Most in my sessions had not had the opportunity to begin to use many Web 2.0 tools or Social Media supports such as Twitter, a blog, or Ning group. They were missing opportunities to collaborate and said as much. The beauty of this, brief, mentoring time together was that the majority of attendees shared with me that they left my session inspired to collaborate more, try new tools and be come active in Social Media networks!

I’m hopeful that as time passes, I will be contacted by participants who will want to be mentored to go further in their work with these tools. I’m hopeful that they will want to connect as they develop themselves not just professionally but also personally as they begin to seek their passion:teaching.

Below is a link to my session Prezi presentation and a  link to the Google Doc handout http://goo.gl/ZqidJ that I shared with attendees.

I want to thank the incredible OCRA conference coordinating team and particularly Julie Niles Petersen for the dedication and hard work in organizing this wonderful conference.

Mentoring does matter! What have you done today, to support or mentor a colleague?

http://prezi.com/alroruns1mpi/20-tidbits-for-new-teachers/