Sharing Student Voice: Students Presenting at Conferences

cover of whitepaperI’m proud to announce the release of Sharing Student Voice: Students Presenting at Conferences. This 10 page monograph contains both research support and practical tips for teachers working with students to plan presentations of student work by students in formal, adult venues, specifically educational conferences. (Download PDF)

The paper contains:

  • Research on student voice and student empowerment, reflecting on 21st century skill development and inclusion of Web 2.0 technology
  • How to plan and submit sessions with student presenters
  • Types of conference sessions and how students best fit into different formats
  • Planning, creating, and practicing the presentation while creating student ownership
  • Treating the presentation as part of the reflective process that builds student voice
  • Balancing the needs of the audience with the needs of students while retaining authentic student voice
  • Top Ten Tips for Student Presenters
  • Logistics tips for bigger conferences and exhibit halls
  • The role of the teacher in the presentation, providing context and being the audience surrogate
  • Session and speaker etiquette and what to expect

I hope this resource is useful to anyone wondering how to take students to speak at a conference, or anyone planning an event that includes students. I wrote it to be a very practical guide for busy teachers!

We often work with teachers to bring Generation YES students to various events to talk about how they work with teachers to improve technology use, or how they function as a trusted part of the tech support team, or how technology literacy can be assessed with student peer mentors. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how best to do this, and want to share it with everyone. It’s not hard to do, but why not learn from our experience (and mistakes!)

Our first monograph, Vision to Action: Including Student Leadership in Your Technology Plan, released in February 2007, was a big hit and we hope to build on that success with more free resources that help school leaders enable student voice to improve education. We all know that student voice and student participation in authentic activities is important, but without focused, ongoing efforts by adults, this can get lost among other priorities. We hope these resources help people get started or keep their momentum going by not having to “reinvent the wheel.”

Over the next few days, I’ll share a few highlights from this new monograph, but if you’d like the whole thing, please feel free to download and share it with others.

Download PDFSharing Student Voice: Students Presenting at Conferences by Sylvia Martinez

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

One Reply to “Sharing Student Voice: Students Presenting at Conferences”

  1. Hi Sylvia,
    I loved the paper, thank you for solidifying many of the ideas and practices we’ve been working on in my district in such a succinct way. We’re starting a program this year having students act as tech support for staff members that want it. It’s been a real win-win. The staff that want to get their content out, but are less comfortable with the tech get a student to help them. And the students, many of whom the tech part is relatively easy, learn the people skills first hand in the relationship.

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