The Literacy Promise Conference

Published on March 6, 2008

I attended the Literacy Promise Conference today. It is sponsored by the Brigham Young University CITES program. I just realized that my computer shut down while I was coming home from the conference and all the notes I took are gone. Drat!!!

This poet named Brod Bagert from New Orleans (3 syllables) spoke to us and he was amazing. He read a lot of his poems and the way that he performed was so inspiring. Here is a link to the recording that I made. This is the cool part of the story. When he started introducing the poem "Booger Love" I thought it would be a great one to record. But, the only recording software I have on my compy is Garageband, and I have not had much success with that. So, I invoked Quicksilver and did a Google search for Audacity, which I had heard about and tried to use before, but never got too far into it.
Bezel Interface

So, in the time that it took him to finish introducing the poem, I was able to download the program, install it, open it, and start recording him. This is why I like Macs. If I had my PC laptop, this never would have been possible. I would have taken way too many steps to get there, and there would be a 95% chance that the program wouldn't work (that is experience talking, by the way, we have had very little success with recording or capturing sound or video on that computer). Also, the battery would have been dead at that point (45 minutes into the conference) and I would have had a hard writing surface to capture the essence of his presentation.



The only thing that vexes me is that I wasn't able to record video with the iSight camera. That would have been better because his performance was not just his voice. So, if anyone knows of an easy free way to do that, please let me know.

By the way, here are my takeaways from the presentation (actual education stuff, imagine that):
  1. Perform poetry to your students and they will start to actually like poetry.
  2. If they like poetry, they will start to write it as a natural step.
  3. If they write it themselves, then you won't have to assign stupid haiku's.
  4. Poetry should be loved and studied just like sports, music, technology, or any other passion that someone possesses. This is key--study and love poetry because you deserve it.
Great presentation. I bought four books (on Amazon ;)

Have a Good Life.