MCTE

I will start off this post by saying that there are several things I found to be beneficial concerning the MCTE. My personal opinion of the conference, however, was not a particularly favorable one. I'll start with what I disliked... When we first arrived we filled out a half sheet of paper that was our "registration form" (if you can call it that) which contained several errors and typos. In all honesty, this isn't that important to the quality of the conference, but I would have expected better from a council of English teachers. Secondly, the first session that I attended was about new classroom teachers, their experiences, their strategies, and their setbacks. It sounded helpful to me and I decided to go only to find out that there was no panel (not even one beginning teacher) and almost all of the information we were given was either obvious, negative, or both. I felt cheated, like I had wasted one of my draft picks on a player who wouldn't even take the field. Finally, another session that really disappointed me was the one on digital storytelling. I hesitated in my decision to go to this session at all because I am pretty experienced with digital storytelling already and I enjoy creating and editing my own movies in my spare time so I wasn't sure if they could teach me anything new, but I figured that perhaps they would have some good ideas about incorporating digital stories into the secondary English classroom. I felt bad for the presenters when their demonstration fell apart at the seams (although a conference room full of English teachers is probably one of the more forgiving audiences that you could hope for), because their technology, which the presentation relied heavily on, failed to work. We barely even got to see an example of a digital story until the very end of the session when we got a brief 15 second clip. Despite all this, I enjoyed the opening speech and felt as though the keynote speaker was very well prepared, engaged, and knowledgeable about her subject of technology use in the classroom. She actually made me chuckle a few times which is quite an accomplishment given the early time of day that it was. Overall, I do feel as though it was a beneficial experience for me to attend this conference, but it wasn't a particularly enjoyable one.