I WILL BE PRESENTING AT NCTE

I am excited to announce that I will be leading a panel at the 2020 Annual Convention for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in Denver in November at the Colorado Convention Center.

SING A SONG OF SIX PIX

Sunday, November 22, 2020, 9:00am-10:15am

Colorado Convention Center

Program Description: Six narrative non-fiction picture books, four authors, two educators, eight different strategies to teach a confluence of skills to a diversity of learners… and one silly song to help remember them all! Join us for a session filled with fun, music, and practical suggestions for the classroom.

The other members of the panel include Dow Phumirik, Andrea Wang, and Beth Anderson. I will be talking more about these talented women and their stories in the months to come. Each of them has a story featured in my upcoming educational book, Story Frames (Brookes Publishing, November 2020). Here are a few of their titles:

Avoiding Zoombombing

Zoobombing is a phenomenon that occurs when someone gets into a Zoom meeting and posts pornography to the attendees and/or starts making inappropriate comments to the group that can include racial slurs, threats, or sexual content. See the post from the New York Times about Zoombombing. This type of intrusion can happen easily if a host has posted a meeting link on Facebook or other social media. This is happening to classrooms on Zoom as well as conferences and even smaller meetings. I am by no means a Zoom expert and I would love to know what more people have to say about this topic, but here are a few things you can do that might help:

1.  Don't post meeting links on social media or public platforms if it can be avoided. You never know who might join the meeting.

2. Make it mandatory that people join the meeting with a password.

3. To prevent other people from sharing inappropriate images during a meeting, click on the arrow next to Share Screen and go to Advanced Sharing Options.

Then select Only Host so that only the host can share his/her screen.

4. To prevent unwanted visitors from making inappropriate comments, go to Manage Participants. Mute EVERYONE. This is also helpful in large meetings when people forget to mute themselves. Then you can decide if you want to allow people to unmute themselves to speak to the group or not. If everyone is muted, they may need to raise their hand to share.

5. Zoom lists other precautions such as using the Waiting Room, Lock Meeting and Disable Private Chat features HERE.

I'm sure other people will have more to share on this topic as well as more advanced advice.