Hello TESOL Day Two… I hopped onto the shuttle to head to the convention center around 9:30 am. I headed straight to the expo hall to get my professional headshot. My sister applied some makeup on me so I could look my best for the picture. I chose to not eat my yummy pizza until I got my picture taken. Knowing that I needed to get coffee, I immediately looked for a Starbucks. I found the signs for one and followed them but to my dismay, it was gated up and closed. I couldn’t believe it! Why would the Starbucks be closed at 9:45 in the morning?! I had to settle for McDonald’s coffee instead. I headed to my first session beginning at 10:30 am. It was called “Transforming Language Learning with Augmented Reality” by Maria Kemijo. This session was amazing!! I know about augmented reality but this session made it a bit more real for me. She shared with us the apps that she prefers using with her students and gave us examples for us to view. I am excited to share this with my students and hopefully, they will be able to create their own examples. Next, I decided to sit in the big commons area to charge my laptop. I made a new friend who works for a company that creates curriculum and supports for ELL teachers. It is called Smart Class by Robotel. According to my friend, it’s a newer product but she seemed very excited about it. I want to learn more about it so I will probably contact her soon. (I headed back to the Smart Class booth on Friday to ask some more questions and got myself a 60 day trial for my class). Around lunchtime, I headed to the expo hall to check out the poster sessions. I love viewing the poster sessions because you can learn a lot in a short amount of time. I’ll be honest though, I tend to not view the posters that are wordy or related to research. Anyway, the first poster I viewed today was named “5-7-5: Using Haiku to Meet Course Objectives” and was presented by Jessica Mathers, University of Southern California. She had her students create haiku poems based on topics they chose blindly. The students’ artwork was stellar and they wrote wonderful poems. I also stopped by a poster session presented by Emma Everson, a Ph.D. candidate from Indiana University. She spoke of The Inadequacies of U.S. Education Policies: ELLs and Reaching Equity during her session. She raised some really good points. For example, the US government has mandates but doesn’t fund them and they are cutting funding for different title programs. I had a nice conversation with her and her parents who made the trip out with her. Day two ended with a nap in the hotel and a wonderful pizza from the hotel room service.
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