Don’t forget, voting opens today for the You Gotta Read blog cover contest. Elixir Bound is entry #10. I’d love to have your vote if you get a minute to check it out!
In other news, I had my first school visit last week. I did a presentation on creating characters. It was for a group of 8th graders (including my oldest nephew, who is also one of my writing buddies), less than a week before graduation. Uh oh! Seriously, though, they were great. They were attentive and I even got some student participation…when they had to. When I mentioned Katniss, one girl said fairly loudly, “Katnip!” And when I talked about Edward Cullen, there were some sighs of delight and a few shouts for team Jacob!
We had a bit of technological snafu when I couldn’t get my PowerPoint presentation to come up on their computer (still not sure why it wouldn’t recognize my files). So instead of having all the bullet points and pictures up on the big white board, they were just up on my laptop screen. Luckily the group and the classroom were on the small side, so they were able to see all the silly pics I created. Including when I put the teacher’s head on a certain famous villain! (The teacher is my friend’s mom, so she was cool with it.)
I was sweating a bit when with the computer stuff, but I had a backup so it worked out okay (for future visits, I think I’ll be prepared with even more ways to access my presentations). Still wish I had been able to give them the full effect, but they got the meat and potatoes…just not the full bells and whistles. The teacher asked some good questions in the Q&A part about revision techniques for the students and also on generating ideas for creative writing. I think I might come up with workshops for students about those topics.
For those of you who do school visits, how do you access your visuals during school visits?
