Since writing my 3 Keys to a Flipped Classroom blog post, I have been reading many great contributions to the discussion around flipping classrooms. Last week I was commenting on Lisa Nielsen’s thoughtful post Five Reasons I’m Not Flipping Over The Flipped Classroom and something occurred to me…

I have flipped my Professional Development!

I’ve done this with my blog and with Twitter.

Professional Development for me used to be about going to sessions on specific days and then trying to ‘bring back’ what I’ve learned and incorporate it into my daily practice. Sometimes this was very challenging, I would get inundated with new information and find it very hard to apply what I learned into what I did on a day-to-day basis. Often my notes would be filed away, not to be seen again.

The Old Way

Sign up -> Go to session -> Take (paper) notes -> File notes away (with intentions to go back to them) -> Repeat.

Now Pro-D seems to be different for me. The key thing is that I don’t ever wait for Professional Development Days or conferences to initiate learning opportunities. In fact, my Pro-D choices stem from what I’m already learning about on Twitter, and sharing in other learning spaces like my blog, Diigo, and Scoop.it.

The New Way

Follow links on Twitter -> Dig deeper then blog my ideas -> Seek related Pro-D opportunities -> Connect to other participants -> Share as I learn -> Consolidate ideas and blog again -> Follow links on Twitter…

Now, Professional Development needs to change to accommodate a new kind of learning journey that participants are on:

1. Share resources, and make connecting easy, ahead of time.

2. Make sessions about action not information.

3. Use the skills of the participants (have them not just participate, but also lead).

Examples:

1. Share resources/connecting ahead of time

• Teasers, Sharing slide decks, conference #hashtags, participant profiles

• Learning in Louisiana – I joined a team from November Learning to present to groups of teachers on the topics of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, PLN’s and other Web2.0 tools. Most of the event was hands-on with teachers having a lot of time to try the tools out.
• Flat Classroom Conference – Beijing 2011 – We broke into teams and developed our own flat projects. I haven’t followed up with our ‘Reportizens‘ project yet, but I do think this is something I would like to pursue!

3. Use participants skills

• EduBloggerCon events which include a ‘Smackdown‘ where participants share tools they like in rapid succession.
• Edcamp – “…an unconference devoted to K-12 Education issues and ideas. A new kind of professional development dedicated to giving educators a voice.”

Putting these three pieces together isn’t easy. If you pre-load too much before hand, not everyone will come prepared. If you are all about action and not information, then why do people need to come to your sessions? If you empower participants to lead, some will thrive on it, while others will wonder why they paid if they had to help run a session.

You can please some people some times, but you can’t please all the people all the time!

It is hard for a one-hour session or even a conference to meet the needs of every participant. That said, I do think there has been a shift in expectations as more educators have become connected learners. For me and for many others, the Pro-D session of old can no longer meet our learning needs. We have flipped our professional development and now we want, we expect, to be active participants in our learning before, during, and after a professional development session.

[Cross-posted on the David Truss :: Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog]

How often we run into this time crunch in the world of writing and the teaching of writing. We don’t have the students write because there’s not enough time to get the laptops out, or there is too much required work to get done. And how often we don’t post a comment, or, gulp, a blog post, because, well, we’re too busy.  But I say just do it. Make time for writing. Get kids writing often. And get them in digital spaces so they can read and comment on each other’s work. Regularly. Engagement, improvement in writing and community building will result.

Tonight we had the final meeting of the  North Section of YWP’s master class in digital writing. Teachers shared their most successful experiences of the year and the discussion quickly gravitated to a fundamental observation: Peer commenting on their YWP digital classrooms had an enormous impact on the students — and the teachers.

One teacher polled the students about what they liked about the site, about writing in a digital space where they got regular comments from their classmates. “The thing that meant most to them,” the teacher said, “was getting peer comments. They really didn’t want my comments — they get those all the time. They wanted their classmates’ point of view on what they were doing.”

Another teacher talked about how she got the students to rate each other’s work on individual projects. She was stunned not only by how accurate the responses were but also how direct — they were not afraid to, politely, tell each other what they thought the other had done well and what they thought had not been done well. As the teacher was telling about this experience, another teacher said she now regularly has her students rate each other’s work — privately to her — and she then gives each student her grade and the average grade the classmates gave each student. Often, she said, the students were stunned by the grade given them by their mates. This was not possible, she added, when the students were merely writing for an audience of one and the rest of the class didn’t see each other’s work.

A sixth grade teacher had his class set up their rubrics for commenting. They jumped at the opportunity, led the discussion and established the guidelines for the commenting and even created samples for the rubric. The teacher said he had seen results: “I’m amazed at the incredible growth” of the commenting. He offered several examples, including this one:

• Good job on the work; it was amazing. I never thought that you could go to so many places in just in one trip.  I have on question for you: How many days/weeks  was the trip? Also why didn’t you bring me anything? Just kidding. But how come going to the animal shelter was your favorite part of the trip and also going to your uncle’s was you favorite part of the trip? I am just confused.   I loved it when you said “Your heart was beating loud and how maybe everyone could hear it.” That was my favorite part.  I think your writing was great, but there were a few parts that were iffy. I hope you find this comment helpful.

What I find interesting about the teacher’s example is the tone: The care, the civility and the specific observations.

A high school teacher said that the digital spaces — and peer commenting — had allowed her to “set aside my red pen” and encourage development of ideas. She also worked with the students in her AP class to establish that “each comment had to be unique to that piece. The comment could not apply to any other piece of writing.” Gone, then, were phrases like “this is a great piece of writing,” or “nice job.” The comments had to provide specific observation. The teacher modeled the commenting but then backed off as the class took over.

One downside: One teacher said that early on it was sometimes “devastating” to a student if he or she didn’t get a comment from a peer. All had developed ways to encourage, require, cajole, trick the kids into making sure everyone received comments and that students did not comment on only friends’ work. Among them: A shared responsibility — if anyone didn’t get a comment on an assignment, everyone’s grade would be reduced. Another told the students that she would not grade any of the work if he saw a piece did not have a comment. And still another teacher got the class to buy into full commenting coverage as a shared responsibility.

In last night’s session there was a consensus among the 15 teachers in class: Their students’ writing had improved as a direct result of regular peer feedback something only possible in a digital space.

Geoffrey Gevalt is founder of Young Writers Project, a small nonprofit in Vermont that works with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in an effort to improve students’ writing skills and digital literacy. To see the project’s work, visit youngwritersproject.org, digitalteachers.net or ywpschools.net He can be reached at ggevalt (at) youngwritersproject.org or 802-324-9537

• Take small steps.
• Find a couple of tech-savvy kids in each of your classes to help.
• Explore the digital world on your own.
• Seek out people in the school or in professional development spheres to mentor you.
• Don’t be afraid to fail.
• Don’t be afraid if you don’t have all the answers – your kids will help.

Teacher Knowledge — Exploring, a few links

• Making Teaching Public Website. A digital exhibition of teaching experiences and tips from elementary school teachers around the country.
• BECTA’s  Research Indicating Benefits of Web 2.0 in the Classroom
• BECTA’s study on impact of Web 2.0 on students’ skills in writing
• Clarence Fisher’s Top Ten Tools for the Classroom.  List created by a very thoughtful and innovative teacher who uses digital technology to teach all subjects – from social studies to math – in a rural school in Canada.
• Teachers teaching teachers. Pretty self-explanatory. Not the smoothest looking resource in the world, but filled with good stuff.
• Bud Hunt is a teacher who has been blogging and focusing on digital education for years.
• Ewan McIntosh is also a formidable expert in digital education.
• An interesting middle school teacher’s blog.
• Edutopia, this is a wonderful resource of information, best practices and ideas.

As a side note, there are ways you can speed up your learning with an hour a day, or, even, a few hours a week by subscribing to digital educator’s blogs (use Google Reader — click here for 5-minute video)or by, gulp, breaking into twitter.com. I use twitter to link folks to cool posts by students at our site, youngwritersproject.org, but I also use twitter to follow folks who know a lot about digital education. As a start, you can follow me , twitter.com/ggevalt, but not to see my posts, but to start following some of the folks I’m following – many are leading experts. Their links and posts will help you explore what’s out there. (For a really basic video on what twitter.com is, go here.

Student Blogging – Taking a small step

Lucy Gray has a great post here on November Learning which offers some simple guideposts, apps and links. I encourage you to read it. Rather than duplicate it here, I’ll just say what our experience has been and remember our first focus is writing and our second focus is digital civility and literacy:

• Commenting has been key to the success youngwritersproject.org and the YWP Schools Project digital classrooms. As I discuss in an earlier blog, getting kids to claim ownership of this digital space will yield great results and the secret to that is to get them commenting on each other’s work and sharing work outside of school.
• Some software makes it difficult to easily comment on each other’s work or to see other’s comments or it puts the kids’ work out in the blogosphere where it is unlikely to get any feedback at all. Develop strategies to combat that.
• Here are some links about commenting.
• A how-to guide on commenting.

A forgotten aspect of getting kids to blog, is ensuring they have:

• keyboarding skills; a site that recommends good tutorial software for keyboarding.
• Adequate computers and/or Internet connection at home; many students do not, and offering these kids opportunity to access school equipment is a viable solution. (One teacher up here is actually organizing a project to refurbish corporate computer discards and give them to kids.)

So with commenting as a key aspect of blogging, here are a few recommendations:

• ywpschools.net  This is not shameless promotion; we are a small nonprofit and we do not yet have the capability of setting up classrooms outside of VT and NH, but will be doing a few national pilots in the coming school year. These sites are best thought of as “containers” that allow teachers to assign, critique and track all student work – even that done on outside Web apps; and allow students to respond to assignments, give and receive feedback and incorporate any multimedia they want. (For the techies among you, we use Drupal.) FYI, one 7^th grade class using our sites this year has 48 students and, in 3 months has produce 669 posts and 1,449 comments to each other!

• wordpress.org This software is relatively easy to use and set up. It’s free. But it does take some time and effort to do right; can a school tech person help? ALSO, there is wordpress-multi-user that may be an option for your school; it is also free.
• kidblog.org Also a free service for student blogs; good functionality in being able to encourage commenting and see what others are doing.
• blogger.com While you can’t beat the price and it’s a great way to get started, it is hard to administer and track student work; it is also hard for students to build community or offer a flurry of feedback.
• edu2.0.com This seems more oriented to classroom management, but it’s free and people are using it for class blogging.

Modest cost alternatives

• edublogs.com This has a limited free offering — storage is low and some advertising. But worth looking at. This service was great and free, but they changed the financing model.
• ning.com This was also headed in a very nice direction — intuitive, free — but recently started charging. Check it out though; has many fine features.
• 21classes.com The free version really is not that useful — little storage, to name one drawback — but paid is relatively inexpensive and offers some good features.

In upcoming posts, I’ll offer you thoughts on podcasting, using images, video commenting, slideshows and other experiences from our digital classroom experiences.

Geoffrey Gevalt is founder of Young Writers Project, a small nonprofit in Vermont that works with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in an effort to improve students’ writing skills and digital literacy. To see the project’s work, visityoungwritersproject.org, digitalteachers.net or ywpschools.net He can be reached at ggevalt (at) youngwritersproject.org or 802-324-9537

Now that holidays are over and schools are back in session, perhaps now is a good time to explore a few tool recommendations.  The following are a few that are popular with educators; start playing with one tool that appeals to you and see where it leads!

One method of publishing is through bloggling. Blogs are made up of a series of linear posts.  The following blogging tools share many of the same features which include posting by visiting their website, through mobile devices or by emailing posts. They have design templates which are generally customizable and support the embedding of media such as links, photos, and videos. A few to try are:

• Blogger
• Edublogs
• Glogster
• Posterous
• Tumblr
• Weebly

Many teachers prefer wikis which are easily editable web pages. Wikis tend to provide more flexibility than blogs in terms of design. Most wiki providers give you a choice of templates and allow for the embedding of widgets which provide additional functionality. For instance, if you are a Google Docs user, you can embed documents in a Wikispaces wiki or you could use Google’s own wiki tool, Google Sites, to do the same thing. While you can usually assign multiple authors to a blog to create individual posts, wikis are better suited for collaborative purposes as you can invite others to edit your entire wiki. A few wiki services to try are:

• Google Sites
• PBworks
• Wikispaces

To see how other teachers are using blogs and wikis, browse through the nominations and winners of the 2010 Edublog Awards and through CASTLE’s list of blogs by discipline and wikis.

Keep in mind that Blogger and Google Sites can be used by themselves or within Google Apps Education Edition if your school has adopted this platform. Wikispaces and PBWorks also offer no cost ad-free wikis to educators and Glogster also has a version for educators. Edublogs is also geared towards school audiences. Education versions of Web 2.0 tools usually give you more security options so that students can use them as well.

Edmodo is another tool worth a look and it defies categorization as a blog or wiki. Designed specifically for schools, Edmodo promotes the concept of micro-blogging and teachers can post easily to their Edmodo space on the web or using a mobile device. Calendars, assignments, links, files, and polls can be shared with students. Groups can be created, and educators can also connect to colleagues.

The selected resources mentioned in this blog post were picked for purely their ease of use and my intention was not to create an overwhelming list that might be interpreted as intimidating. However,  if you are interested in trying additional tools, read on.

Via Twitter, I asked other educators for suggestions of simple to use publishing tools and VoiceThread, Animoto, Wallwisher, and Audioboo were mentioned. Also, Larry Ferlazzo recommends various tools within his great list of his blog posts geared toward tech novices.

If you have any additional tools or strategies that you recommend, share them in the comments of this blog!

As a former teacher and current learning consultant and parent of two school-aged children, my experiences tell me that clear and regular communication with families is really important. This may seem like a no-brainer, but in this day and age, it’s even more essential. Busy families rely on technology, particularly cell phones, for communication, and papers tend to get lost in the household shuffle.

At my house, we appreciate frequent electronic communication because my sixth grader has a mild executive functioning learning disability, meaning that she has difficulty with organization. As Julia begins junior high, I need quick access to her assignments and grades to make sure everything is running smoothly for her. While I hope I am not “a helicopter parent”, I do know that I have to be in tune with her school life. As a typical pre-adolescent, she’s not always forthcoming about such details!

Given that she’s my kid, it’s not particularly surprising that Julia thrives in a digital environment, too. I decided a few weeks ago that I would help Julia get organized electronically as she received an iPhone as a birthday gift. Experimenting with a web-based tool called LiveBinders, I wanted to organize her teachers’ web sites in one place so that she could quickly access course material on her new device. Much to my surprise, only a couple of her teachers had currently updated web sites. One was published, but contained the original Latin placeholder text that comes standard with Apple’s iWeb software. The teacher had yet to fill in sections of her web site with her own content, and Julia thought her teacher’s web site was in Spanish when she saw this!

I’m uncomfortable publicly criticizing schools where my children attend, and I have to say that in all other ways, we are really happy and impressed with Julia’s school. Her teachers are energetic, love teaching, and care about our daughter. I do wonder why more of her teachers aren’t utilizing the web more efficiently to help kids and their families, though. At her previous school, Julia regularly accessed the web site of her world language teacher who posted assignments, handouts, and audio files to support student learning and it made a huge difference in helping Julia learn to help herself.

It’s always been a struggle to get teachers to see the value in communicating with students and families via the web. People don’t have time, don’t see the point, and don’t readily see the benefits for publishing a web page. Some teachers I’ve known believe that posting assignments enables students to not accurately keep their traditional assignment notebooks.

When this issue came up with my daughter’s school, I felt that it was not my place to dictate what teachers should do, and thought perhaps I was missing something about this debate. Thus, I posted the following question to my Facebook page, and trusted friends and acquaintances from all walks of my life responded:

Do you think teachers should keep an updated web page to communicate with parents? Is it really that difficult to post a minimum of information to keep parents (and kids) updated?

The responses varied, but all agreed some sort of communication was essential. One teacher noted that she had less parent phone calls and email because everything was clearly posted on her class website. Another said she kept a blog, and the parents loved it, while a third indicated, “My parents, over the years, have come to depend on updated information available 24/7 as well as a way to connect with other parents.” And another teacher friend wrote, “When my son was in middle school, the teachers posted all the homework assignments to their district web pages each day. It made a HUGE difference to us! My son has ADD and having that information available 24/7 helped keep him on track. Now that he is in HS, there is nothing like that available and I really miss that.” Even a university professor shared how she’s utilizing the web in her courses, “I regularly use email, wikispaces, university course management software, and so on in my classes. I even use blogs to ‘channel’ student questions and discussion. I’m not the world’s most creative person, but even I can take advantage of these tools to make my teaching better.”

On the negative side, another friend who’s involved in the PTA at her daughter’s school wrote, “I can’t even get my 3rd grader’s teacher to answer an e-mail….The teachers in our district were all given websites a few years ago, and were expected to use them. I have yet to see one who does it…..I do the website and e-mail for our PTA, and have been able to track how well we are actually staying in touch. Very few parents check our website; site visits are virtually nonexistent between e-mail messages. In other words, they only go if I remind them, AND usually only for something they really want or need to know. In middle school, parents are expected to get online daily to check on their children. However, there seems to be no expectation that the teachers will update in a timely and accurate way–I am very disappointed in the fact that we’ve invested so much in technology, and this is the best we can do.” This opens up another can of worms in terms of expected norms and accountability in the use of technology in schools.

Finally, another educator added to our Facebook thread with a creative spin around the student role in communication, “What I do instead is frequently write lengthy newsletters and updates; I’m a familiar name in the parents’ email inboxes. I try to give the overall perspective on what’s going on, but not details about assignment due dates, etc. (unless it’s a really big assignment and parental involvement would be helpful). Every other week or so, I assign my students the task of taking their parents on tours of our class online network. There the parents will see descriptive student essays (blogs) on recent activities, photos, reviews of books, and the like. They’ll be able to look at recent conversations the kids and I have been having.” How about this approach for promoting student autonomy!

At any rate, to answer my original question, there really is no right or wrong way to communicate with parents, just as long as teachers do it on a regular and consistent basis. Giving parents a window into the life of your clasroom is beneficial for so many reasons and it doesn’t have to be difficult.

In a follow up post sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll suggest some ways for getting started if you want to go the electronic route. In the meantime, I hope that teachers who are already leveraging blogs, wikis, and other kinds of web spaces will share their sites in the comments in order to inspire others.

Yesterday, SlideRocket announced that they have developed a new HTML5 player for their online presentation software. This doesn’t allow users to edit presentations using an iOS device. Instead, it allows others to view presentations that have already been created and shared with them.

SlideRocket HTML5 Player from SlideRocket on Vimeo.

Then today, Google announced that their Google Docs productivity suite is now editable from any iOS device (not sure if this change is actually HTML5). Before you get too excited, understand that the editing is VERY limiting. Basically, you can type. That’s it. Period. You can’t even start a new Google Doc from the device or delete a document you no longer want.

While these two products are getting a very limiting face lift so that they are usable on the now popular iOS devices, I believe the announcements mark a gradual shift to more and more companies going in this direction in future development. I certainly hope the speed of this starts picking up.

To keep up with the changes and help other educators find the apps that will be valuable for students using iOS devices, I started a Google Doc that you can update with any Web based tools that you find work well on these devices. The document is openly editable with or without a Google Docs account. Unfortunately, if you update them on an iPad, you won’t be able to keep the formatting I started.

Please feel free to pass this document along.

I love this class. The teachers come from schools that are 220 miles apart. We have teachers from grades 3 through 12; some are brand new some have been teaching for 20+ years. We have two librarians, two science teachers and an art teacher. Apart from their different styles, experience, knowledge of technology and personalities, they have enormous differences between their schools — in terms of leadership, policies AND students. For instance, recently we spent quite a bit of time in one group talking about the startling difference between three teachers’ requirements for assessing student work. One teacher has to post data responses on rubrics for each kid once a week;  another has to devote 8 classes during the year for on-demand portfolio writing that is sent out for external assessment; and a third said, “I’d die if I had to do that; I grade them. And I write up my observations about their progress at the end of the year.” And knowing the latter teacher, I bet those are  detailed, useful, observant assessments. But more on that at another time.

What is great is to see the very different approaches the teachers are taking in their digital classrooms.

Two teachers in the class are a team — she language arts, he science. I’ve known these guys for nearly 7 years and this story should tell you what kind of teachers they are: Three years ago YWP held a kid-organized writing workshop on a day that had the most miserable weather of the year. And for those of you who’ve never been to Vermont, well, it ain’t no Arizona. Thirty-two kids came to the session (we had no power for the first hour) and the language arts teacher drove almost two hours to bring two of her students. (Her science partner was flattened with illness so couldn’t make it.) Oh, I forgot to mention, it was a Saturday. Why did she make the trip? “Because I knew how much this meant to the kids.”

So flash forward. The two teachers love the digital classroom. They’ve never used one before, but they are finding all sorts of uses for it as they go.  And their involving the kids in how it gets used. The other day, on a whim, the language arts teacher decided to create a tag on the site called “extra.” Then she told the  7th and 8th graders that they were free to use the “extra” tag anytime they wanted to post something they’d done on their own or anything they wanted to share; but she also said there’d be no additional credit, no assessment and she and her partner probably wouldn’t have time to read them all. That was 10 days ago.

So here’s what the 46 seventh graders have done: They’ve posted 52 “extras.”  Just for the heck of it.  (Some important context: This school has only one computer lab that’s in constant use and you have to sign up a week in advance. So these guys haven’t had that many class visits to the site. Additional detail: Last Sunday at 7:30 a.m. eight kids were logged onto the site.)  In 6 weeks, with only a few visits to the site in class, the 7th graders have posted 245 pieces of writing and 810 comments to each other. Er, make that 811, a kid just posted something.

Here’s an excerpt of what one of the teachers posted on her own blog in the Master’s class space:

Every so often, we have them work on a piece that is graded. Because we talk about the requirements for the graded pieces, and because we give feedback for pieces to be submitted to be published with Young Writers Project, students are beginning to understand the value of good comments.

So what does all this tell me? That these 7th graders are beginning to own this space; never mind that it’s part of school; never mind that it’s a place where they also do homework. And it tells me that this pair of teachers is allowing these kids to set their own course, take control of what’s going on and engage. On their own.

So this is further evidence that when you use digital classrooms, and I’m not talking about individual student blogs that are oprhaned somewhere by their lonesome out there in the ethernet, but when you have your students post on digital spaces where they can easily see each other’s work and freely comment, help the students feel like it’s their space. Here’s how:

• Let the students post freely with no moderation.
• Don’t give them the power to delete; they’ll figure out that in a nano second and will know that if they post something inappropriate everyone will see.
• Lead them in an exercise where they set the rules for commenting.
• Gently nudge them about the quality of their commenting (and model with your own commenting) until they begin to realize its true value.
• From time to time, show them some of the comments and ask them whether they’re following their own rules.
• Let go a bit; give them control on what’s going on and be comfortable with the fact you are NOT going to be able to read everything.
• Create an “extra” tag.

So I appreciate these teachers and what they are doing. Their names, by the way, are Cindy Faughnan and Rick Schluntz and they teach at Hartford Memorial Middle School in White River Junction, VT.

Geoffrey Gevalt is founder of Young Writers Project, a small nonprofit in Vermont dedicated to helping students become better writers. To see the project’s work, visit youngwritersproject.org, digitalteachers.net or ywpschools.net He can be reached at ggevalt (at) youngwritersproject.org

My name is Geoffrey Gevalt and I am a new NL guest blogger. For 33 years I was a journalist; I believed it a calling, a profession, really, that was affirmed by the First Amendment and that necessitated long hours, low pay, dogged and sometimes unsuccessful journeys and greasy food consumed late at night and washed down with beer. I was lucky enough to work with superb editors and writers and along the way I picked up a few  awards as both a writer and editor. For two years I had the privilege of choosing the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting and, if pressed, could give you details from many of the entries I read. I am proud to say that three people I selected, candidates that I fought for, eventually won and if we ever meet and you’ve gotten your head around the math problem there, I’ll tell you the story.

As you can tell, I was born in the Early Jurassic Period, which fell just before the Late Great Newspaper Demise Period. And, if ever we meet, I will get into my rap about how the retraction of the American news business has been the primary cause of the decrease in our nation’s collective civic knowledge and the increase in our lack of civility in public discourse. But I will spare you that discussion here.

Because I am now a digital educator. And my life has a different mission. And I have different concerns: I believe that if we can get kids to write well they will gain confidence, learn more, succeed more and become better citizens. But we are woefully neglecting writing in our schools and in this new digital world, where writing is needed more than ever, we are doing a tremendous disservice to our kids — particularly disadvantaged kids — by not teaching them how write their way out of a paper bag.

Thankfully, many students, teachers and principals agree with me.

So let me speed up a bit. In 2003, I started the Young Writers Project as first a monthly and then a weekly feature of best student work in the newspaper where I was managing editor. Our thinking was to get student voices into the paper in some section other than Sports or Police Blotter and raise awareness of the importance of writing.  The feature, assisted by teachers and professional writers who had accompanying content on writing instruction, was wildly successful and by its third year we received 750 student submissions.

In 2006 I was presented with an idea: the Vermont Business Roundtable, a collection of business and higher education leaders, wanted to give me a two-year grant to get me to jump off a cliff, form an independent nonprofit and see what I could make of this idea. So I did.

And I can tell you that each brilliant thing that I’ve done since then has been an accident that occurred because I didn’t know any better. And if I ever lose that inclination — blind exploration, experimentation, followed by cold-sweat panic What have I gotten myself into? — I probably will no longer be listening and no longer trying new things.

For instance, I began my new career, after one day off, by building an interactive Web site, youngwritersproject.org, and doing three things in the process that were, by accident, brilliant:

• I let kids blog and comment at will. Message to kids? We trust you. Resulting behavior? Civility, community building and individual growth — and oh yes, a hell of a lot of writing.
• I did not allow them to delete anything. Message to kids? I really do trust you, but I also know your bad habits and I’m protecting you from them. Resulting behavior? In four years, we’ve had only a handful of posts and comments that had to be “unpublished” and even those were “learning moments.”
• We expanded our Newspaper Series to first five and now nine newspapers. Message to kids? Your writing has a purpose. Resulting behavior? We have published work of nearly 3,500 kids and are now receiving 325+ submissions a week in the tiny state of Vermont (60,000 grade 4-12 students in total).

The next big accident came in early 2007 when I suggested to two teachers running an after school writing program for fifth graders that I’d build them a Web site and, um, mentor them in using it. (They barely knew how to use a mouse.)  Resulting behavior? The kids wrote more, revised more, got to know each other better. More importantly, the teachers noted, they became a community  even though the kids went to five different schools and didn’t know each other. The program was a success. (Side note: The program ended due to lack of funding. Note to self: So you left the newspaper industry to work with the education industry? )

But the success led to pilots and more pilots, surveys and interviews with teachers, testing and modifications that led to our rolling out, in 2009/10, a comprehensive digital classroom program that includes individual school Web sites for digital classrooms, training and ongoing mentoring for teachers, materials and ideas and an optional Master’s Practicum accredited by a local college. In our first year, we worked with upwards of 150 teachers and 6,500 students.

This year the demand was greater and many of last year’s schools wanted me to go deeper, to go school- or district-wide. Note to self: Build capacity. Do fewer schools. So this year, we’re doing, gulp, more. And the Master’s course now has 31 teachers with the North Section meeting where I work (northern Vermont) and the South Section meeting  in mid-Vermont (we call everything south).

So the message to teachers has been this:

• Use digital technology to create civil online spaces for school and “extra” work;
• Get the kids to own that space;
• Let them post and comment at will (but don’t let them delete); and
• You will know if it’s successful if it’s out of control.

So now for your second question: What is this guy going to be writing about? ( And please tell me he’s not going to be writing about his life!)

Glad you asked. And no, I will not be writing about my life.

What I will be sharing in this space are ideas, things kids do — writing, art, podcasts, etc — and things teachers do — class exercises, discussions, break throughs. From time to time I’ll talk about how teachers find solutions to things like budget issues, equipment shortages and assessment requirements. Or I’ll talk about what kids would rather be doing than going to today’s schools. I’ll also share with you a lot of links so that hopefully you can try some things out. For instance, check this out: youngwritersproject.org/node/48724 which a kid wrote in her spare time and then slammed, in her spare time. (Question: Can we get kids doing this IN class?)

But a few words of caution: I’m incredibly busy. I am sitting here with a gnawing sense of failure because I need to finish a grant application and prepare for a workshop and, oh yes, do some site work. So my posts will not be regular like the sun and moon. And I really get cranky and lost and borderline neurotic if I feel no one is reading me. I am like any writer. I am like any young writer, too. So please comment. Please react in some way that tells  me you are reading.

Because that’s the secret of digital writing: Commenting. Very simple. Forget about the slideshows and podcasts and digital storytelling and all that. If you can focus on the one thing that digital technology offers you and your students — an incredibly efficient way for students (and you) to read each other’s work and provide feedback — you will be stunned. It is so easy. And it does so much for a student. For a class. Great, magical things result.

I look forward to telling you about some of them.

Geoffrey Gevalt is founder of Young Writers Project, a small nonprofit in Vermont dedicated to helping students become better writers. To see the project’s work, visit youngwritersproject.org, digitalteachers.net or ywpschools.net He can be reached at ggevalt (at) youngwritersproject.org

I just had the opportunity to sit in on the first of a few Wolfram Alpha webinars targeted toward educators. The session was focused on how this tool can be used in the classroom. While advanced users probably won’t get too much out of it, it’s a great overview for beginners. One part I was a bit excited to see was the Widget Builder. This tool allows anyone to build widgets that utilize the power of Wolfram Alpha.

If you think Wolfram Alpha is just for math and science, think again. There are many different ways to use this tool in other subject areas as well.

If you are interested in visiting one of the next sessions, simply follow this link. In addition, if you are interested in downloading the Wolfram Alpha app for your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, the tool is being sold at a discount for a limited time. An Android version is coming soon.

Purdue University has announced Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile web application that allows students and teachers to collaborate in near real-time using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, SMS or the Hotseat web app itself. It’s Mazur formalized. It’s not open to the public (yet?), but you can see more on the promising  Hotseat here.

Using the support form on their site, we sent a quick email and asked if someone might be able to Skype with us the next day. Within hours, we were contacted by the CEO and Founder of Aviary, Avi Muchnick. He said he would be happy to join us.

Avi and his colleague Michael Galpert joined us the following morning and spent about 20 minutes with us talking about how their fantastic toolset was born. But then, when we were about done, they took the time to talk to the group of teachers in the room and ask them about their thoughts and what features were important to them as educators. They have real interest in the education community and in making their tool a good one for students. I really think that gave the participants a bit of a sense of ownership that they didn’t have prior to the call.

Now, the conversation was great, but during the process, I was able to emphasize an important point that I had been trying to get across during the 3-day workshop. We have the ability to talk to interesting people anywhere in the world. It’s easy, it’s inexpensive and it brings so much more interest into the teaching and learning process.

Click here for a related post about Aviary.

Unlike the big boys out there (Photoshop, Illustrator, Garageband, etc.), this service is free, and from the bit I have used it, is fairly stable. Most of my experimentation has been done with the Audio editor. Being that I’m on a Mac and usually use Garageband for audio editing, I was quite impressed with the audio editor’s interface. It’s very similar to Garageband.

Probably the best part of this site is that it’s not only dedicated to providing the tools, but it provides a tutorial area where you can break down different creations to see how they were built. You’re even given all of the source files so that you can follow along. If you’ve never touched something like Photoshop before, the Aviary toolset will walk you through how to use all of the tools in context as you create your own masterpieces.

Try it out and let us know what you think. If you create something with one of the tools, post a link and share.

The tutorial below explains how to get a Google Maps account, find the Google Map overlays and add one of these overlays to your own map.

To view this video, I highly recommend that you click on the full screen icon at the bottom right hand corner of the video window. You will see it when the video plays and you hover your mouse over the video window. This video is also available on YouTube and TeacherTube.