Running Head: INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES PRESENTATION REFLECTION

In November 2013, I attended the annual COTESOL conference as a presenter. I felt very fortunate to have my presentation proposal accepted; I know that competition can be stiff, and as a graduate student, I was pleased to have the opportunity to showcase something I am knowledgeable and enthusiastic about. I copresented a collaborative demonstration of an interactive online learning website called Edmodo. The presentation was titled Interactive Technologies Enhance Student Experience and Accountability, and I presented it with a colleague from my TESL/TEFL M.A. cohort, Kristie Yelinek. The original idea for the proposal came to me when a professor I had at CSU, Dr. Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker, asked our class to write a mock COTESOL proposal as part of a final portfolio assignment. She allowed us to work with a classmate, since professional presentations are often presented in pairs or larger groups. My friend Kristie and I talked about what we could do, and I knew I wanted to present about something I could share with others in the field; something I felt knowledgeable about, that I thought could be new to others, and which would be valuable as a language teaching and learning tool. We chose to write our proposal about an interactive site designed for classroom use Edmodo because I had just learned of it and begun to master it, and I had found it incredibly valuable in my own teaching. As a first-term intern teaching a low-intermediate grammar class at INTO CSU, the cooperating adjunct professor I was teamed up with introduced me to the online site as an interface for communicating with students. I spent many hours exploring the sites possibilities and getting acquainted with all it had to offer. At one point during the seven week term, I shared my new-found knowledge with other colleagues of mine at

INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES PRESENTATION REFLECTION INTO during a lunch-time professional development session I led. The response was enthusiastic and appreciative; I decided that Edmodo was going to be a highly valued and oft-implemented tool at my institution. The reaction of my coworkers prompted me to use Edmodo as my focus for the mock proposal I wrote, assuming it would appear relevant and novel. Dr. Nekrasova-Beker offered excellent feedback and encouraged Kristie and I to actually submit our presentation proposal to COTESOL. That years theme, Blazing New Trails, lent itself well to a presentation designed to introduce a new technological interface for classroom use. Edmodo has been gaining in popularity over the last five years, and because being an English language teacher currently in the field means catering to advancements in technology, it is a timely tool to explore. Our students require literacy in the tenants of language proficiency, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing, but they additionally must master technology if they are to be successful in a modern, global society. We were confident that our proposed topic fit a real need, and to my delight, the proposal we submitted was accepted. We presented our powerpoint presentation to a (tiny) packed room on Friday, November 8th, 2013. In terms of division of labor, Kristie and I split the work based on two major components of the site that we wanted to share. Its most appealing features are the ability to communicate openly as members of a common classroom page, the means to assign homework and respond to submitted work electronically, the capacity to create quizzes which are then automatically graded on the site, and the capability to provide annotations and feedback on extended writing electronically. Because I had prior experience using the site in my grammar class, I developed slides demonstrating

INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES PRESENTATION REFLECTION how to set up user accounts and classroom groups, as well as simple day-to-day tasks such as posting and responding to submitted assignments, creating quizzes, and using the automatically-provided data to engage in reflective teaching practices. As a teaching assistant in CSUs composition program, Kristie was primarily interested in using the writing feedback tools available on Edmodo. We worked together to find research supporting the use of interactive technologies Edmodo specifically in ESL classrooms, then created our instructional slides independently. Finally, we met to assimilate our presentation, and we presented it to our CSU colleagues at a Mock COTESOL event organized by the graduate student association at Dr. Nekrasova-Bekers suggestion. I am proud of and pleased by our success at COTESOL; our presentation had a good turn-out, and we later received email notification that a few conference attendees voted for our presentation as Best of COTESOL 2013. I am glad to have knowledge and skill with this particular learning tool, and I am gratified to have had the opportunity to present at a professional conference early on in my career. The experience was valuable at the time, but it also instilled in me a desire to continue researching teaching tools and methods that will help me and my colleagues improve our classroom practice.