News and Notes: January 28, 2009

Thank you to all who attended last weeks meeting. A special thank you to Pam Coke for speaking at our meeting. For those of you who may not know Dr. Pamela Coke, she is a faculty member in the CSU English Education area and the teacher adviser to NCTE@CSU. The list of Dr. Coke's accomplishments, awards, and general awesomeness would certainly take up a whole blog. If you would like to find out more about her, please visit the CSU English Department web page. The presentation that Dr. Coke shared with us focused on the structure of NCTE as a National organization, the benefits of becoming a member, and where we fit as student's within that organization.

A few key highlights that she mentioned about NCTE are:

• Becoming a member of a professional community
• Gaining new teaching ideas
• Access to teaching conferences and conventions, author lectures, and networking
  
• The opportunity to help professionalize the profession

She also discussed the NCTE state affiliate CLAS, the Colorado Language Arts Society, and their upcoming conference March 5th-8th in Denver. For graduate students, travel funds may be available through the English Department. For all members of NCTE@CSU travel funds may be available through the SLICE office here on campus. For more information on the CLAS conference visit http://www.clas.us/.

To wrap the up the evening we discussed what members of NCTE@CSU might like to hear about in the future. Here's the list of what we brainstormed:

• Continuing Education Requirements (post-licensure)
• Pro's-Con's of teachers Unions
• What happens after I student teach: options, routes and roads
• Writers' Workshops
• Book Banning and Censorship
• RTI
• How do I get published: conference proposals, submitting to journals, etc.
  
• Open session with a School Counselor
  
• Dotting my i's and crossing my t's: Information session with the State Education Agency

Do you have other ideas? Please let us know at nctecsu@gmail.com.

Keep your eyes open for updates and add-ons to our blog and feel free to comment. We look forward to a great semester and to seeing you all at our next meeting. Please note the change of day and location. Meetings are now on every other Monday in Eddy Hall, room 10. See you there!

Next Meeting:
Monday, February 9, Eddy Room 10
Speaker: Dr Louann Reid
Topic: The Video Generation