WMWP Technology Liaison Kevin Hodgson is publishing a weekly webcomic through the Newspapers in Education site of MassLive (home to The Springfield Republican) that looks at the digital divide between kids and adults, and technology in the classroom. The webcomic is called Boolean Squared and is designed to poke fun at teaching in this technological age.
Venture into MassLive to view the comic.
Also, you can visit the archive of Boolean Squared.
(Note: this was an email from the National Writing Project that was sent out to all of this year’s Summer Institute participants but we thought it was a good list of resources to share out to a wider audience.)
Hello,
We hope you enjoyed your experience writing and responding to colleagues nationally through the E-Anthology this summer. There are more opportunities to extend the excitement of writing online and reaching a larger audience for your students and yourselves. Below are a few examples that we are familiar with that you might want to consider. Why not take a few minutes before the school year starts in earnest to explore them to see if they fit into your curriculum?
Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/nwpsites/writing_our_future.csp
For high school teachers and mentors who would like to capitalize on young people’s interest in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Google and the National Writing Project have teamed up to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future. You will be receiving a special bulletin shortly with full details on participating in this timely project.
Writing Matters: What’s Your Story?
http://www.writingmatters.org/
Writing Matters offers online writing instruction for middle schools. It features genre studies, animations, lessons, publishing tools and professional development. The Writing Matters portal is set up to provide teachers access to lessons plans, classroom visual and an online location to collect, evaluate and publish student work.
Click! Photography Changes Everything
http://click.si.edu/
NWP teacher-consultants and summer institute participants are invited to contribute writing about the impact of photography in their lives to a new project of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative: Click! Photography Changes Everything. This project provides an opportunity to reflect on the history, spread, practice, and power of photography by inviting written reflections on photography to be submitted through its participatory website.
The National Conversation on Writing
http://comppile.tamucc.edu/NCoW/index.htm
What do people write and read every day? What makes people feel they are writers (or not)? Through online video, audio, and print texts The National Conversation on Writing hopes to encourage a discussion on these questions.
Have a magnificent school year!!!
The E-Team
This comes from a task force within Project Outreach:
You can view a bigger version here or download a flier to pass around your school.
WMWP partnered up with Smith Vocational Agricultural High School again this summer to offer a Claymation Movie Camp. There were 15 middle school students working with stop-motion animation over the course of four days and they created numerous movies.
You can view the Claymation Camp Blog to view some of the projects.
Two of the teachers — Tina and Maria — also were new to stop-motion animation but that didn’t stop them from trying their hand at moviemaking.
Here is their debut movie:
var so = new SWFObject(”http://www.edublogs.tv/flvplayer.swf”,”mpl”,”450″,”355″,”8″);so.addParam(”allowscriptaccess”,”always”);so.addParam(”allowfullscreen”,”true”);so.addVariable(”height”,”355″);so.addVariable(”width”,”450″);so.addVariable(”file”,”http://www.edublogs.tv/uploads/rxdR3oAsdNbtL5jAg5fl.flv”);so.addVariable(”searchbar”,”false”);so.write(”player”);
This ran in the Daily Hampshire Gazette:
The Western Massachusetts Writing Project has been working on crafting a mission statement for the organization that will represent not only who we are as an organization, but also who we will become as we move into the future. This work has been helped along by the leaders of Project Outreach by providing a lens to look at our site and our work along the lines of social justice, race, gender and equity issues.
This week, the WMWP Executive Board adopted the new mission statement for our organization and the board believes that the statement not only documents the role that we play in the Pioneer Valley and beyond, but also maps out a vision for the future of the organization.
Here is the new WMWP Mission Statement:
“The mission of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, a local site of the National Writing Project, is to create a professional community where teachers and other educators feel welcomed to come together to deepen individual and collective experiences as writers and our understanding of teaching and learning in order to challenge and transform our practice. Our aim is to improve learning in our schools — urban, rural and suburban.
Professional development provided by the Western Massachusetts Writing Project values reflection and inquiry and is built on teacher knowledge, expertise and leadership.
Central to our mission is the development of programs and opportunities that are accessible and relevant to teachers, students and their families from diverse backgrounds, paying attention to issues of race, gender, language, class and culture and how these are linked to teaching and learning.”
Using a site called Wordle, which transforms text into word clouds, Technology Liaison Kevin Hodgson created this image of our mission statement. Notice how learning and writing are so prominent in the mix.
What do you think of the mission statement? Does it reflect your values and your vision of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project? We invite you to leave comments and thoughts here at this blog post. To do so, just click on the link for comments just above this post.
Are you interested in writing for publication? Here is an opportunity just for you.
Professional Writing Retreat
August 5-7, 2008, Stump Sprouts Guest Lodge, West Hawley, MA.
This three day writing retreat will give participants the opportunity to work on writing projects for publication, in such venues as professional journals, newsletters, newspapers, and on-line venues. Come to write, share work in progress, and receive feedback. The coaches are to former WMWP site directors, Charlie Moran and Bruce Penniman. Enrollment is limited to 16 people. Registration fee of $160 includes meals and lodging. A copy of the brochure is attached with more information and application instructions. Note that applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis so early application is advisable. Final decisions about participation will be made in early June.
(Read about last year’s retreat)
The new Western Massachusetts Writing Project Technology Team held its first major event — Technology Across the Curriculum — that drew about 25 teachers to the Norris Elementary School in Southampton on a Saturday morning in May.
The event featured workshops on social networking, podcasting and digital storytelling, and the featured speaker was Mike Flynn, the Massachusetts Teacher of the year. Mike talked about video production in the lower elementary classroom.
If you missed the event, or just want to re-live it, there are three podcasts that you can listen to or download into your computer or MP3 player:
Finally, here are two comics created by participants in the Digital Storytelling workshop:
If you could not attend the conference, you can still access our Technology Across the Curriculum Weblog, where all the workshop links and activities are located.
– The WMWP Tech Team
Members of the Executive Board and the Project Outreach Leadership Team met on March 29 in Bartlett Hall to look at our site through a lens of inquiry. The aim of the meeting was to practice ‘looking and looking again’. Along with our mission statement draft and NWP Project Outreach goals we set to the task of examining our SI documents as they relate to the Project Out reach goals of access, relevance and diversity. The discussions were intense and productive. Hard questions were asked of ourselves and our site. As the morning moved into the afternoon, we knew that the work was just beginning. More questions unfolded than answers.
The answers to the initial question of “What do we know for sure?” became less clear as we delved deeply into our core values as a site. We know we have more work to do. The issues of access, relevance and diversity bubbled to the surface with questions and comments related to our program schedules, how we promote our programs, and the language we use to describe our programs. We looked at the SI from every angle. Finally, we realized that we need to bring “new eyes to the table” that we can not answer all the questions without finding ways to hear new voices.
As a teacher, executive board member, soon to be ex-co director and a current SI co director I am excited about our journey. I am looking forward to our next steps and eager to hear from our broader community of teacher leaders.
By: Mary Farrin
Another of our WMWP teachers was featured in the Springfield Republican this past week. Diana Roy, who now coordinates the partnership between the newspaper and our writing project site, showcased some of her students as poets.
Diana begins her piece by asking:
“In this age of high stakes testing, some wonder if a place exists in middle school English education for creative writing. After all, students are held accountable for reading in all genres and for writing in response to literature or to an essay prompt, but is there time for a skill that is not tested?“
Republican photo by DAVE ROBACK From left, Diana Roy, a teacher at the Paul R. Baird Middle School in Ludlow, works with students Nicole E. Moore and Sophia J. Fernandes.
