The National Gallery of Writing, hosted by NCTE, now boasts 2,136 galleries and 19,395 submissions at this writing!
That’s a pretty cool number, so I decided to tour around a bit. There is some wonderful writing in those galleries, although navigation through the labyrinth isn’t so easy. How to set up browsing through the online gallery must have caused a mighty headache for the NCTE folks and they clearly did the best they could.
I came at it from my usual lens: are there digital compositions represented in the writing in these Galleries? I’m still not sure, since my search queries mostly turned up empty. I found one that I did (see below) and found a beautiful digital story that my friend Troy did about his family, but mostly, I found … nothing digital. There were plenty of pieces of writing that examined or focused on the world of digital media (I was intrigued by a short story written as Tweets, for example, and filed that away in my head).
Part of the problem was that the format for submission did not exactly lend itself to digital compositions. I set up a gallery for digital stories from my students around their Dream Scenes, but abandoned it when I realized that even though the videos were very small, the site would not allow me to upload them directly and embed right there. I would have to go through some hoops, and I didn’t have the time. How many others stopped at that hurdle, I wonder?
It seems to me that if NCTE is truly committed to the concept of multimedia composition (as evidence by the strong papers it has put out in the last year), it would have built a system into the framework of the National Day on Writing to allow for folks to easily share digital stories, podcasting, etc.
The National Writing Project (0f which I am part of) recently released its updated Vision Statement. It is thoughtful and a great way to think about both the organization (inclusive, open and giving leadership to teachers) and writing itself.
Writing in its many forms is the signature means of communication in the 21st century. The NWP envisions a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world.
Here are the Core Principles of NWP:
The core principles at the foundation of NWP’s national program model are:
Teachers at every level—from kindergarten through college—are the agents of reform; universities and schools are ideal partners for investing in that reform through professional development.
Writing can and should be taught, not just assigned, at every grade level. Professional development programs should provide opportunities for teachers to work together to understand the full spectrum of writing development across grades and across subject areas.
Knowledge about the teaching of writing comes from many sources: theory and research, the analysis of practice, and the experience of writing. Effective professional development programs provide frequent and ongoing opportunities for teachers to write and to examine theory, research, and practice together systematically.
There is no single right approach to teaching writing; however, some practices prove to be more effective than others. A reflective and informed community of practice is in the best position to design and develop comprehensive writing programs.
Teachers who are well informed and effective in their practice can be successful teachers of other teachers as well as partners in educational research, development, and implementation. Collectively, teacher-leaders are our greatest resource for educational reform.
Here is the second in my series of Boolean Squared comics about Freejunk (ie, Freecycle) and also about the dangers that are some of the older computers that we just toss into the landfills. (In fact, this series of comics was as much inspired by the Freecycle movement as pictures of landfills with piles and piles of old desktop computers).
Last night, we received one of those automatic phone calls from our community’s School Superintendent, informing us that she is asking principals to show President Obama’s speech tomorrow. At the school where I teach, we are planning the same thing and my principal sent home a letter on Friday, alerting families.
This whole thing is crazy but it makes sense: when we showed our sixth graders the presidential inauguration, we got an angry phone call from a parent who was passionately opposed to his son watching with the event in school.
I know politics is alive and well, but to complain when the president wants to talk to kids about staying in school, show respect to teachers and other kids, and also to study hard for a better life — that seems absurd to me. I would not have complained if my kids watched a Republican Rightwinger President talk about those things.
My aim is to grab the text of the speech, pop it into Wordle and have my students examine themes and phrases that Obama uses, so that we can talk about rhetoric. Talk about a learning experience, right?
On Friday, I showed this interview with my students and they were impressed by the student reporter and by the president’s responses.
This comes from Found Magazine, which is worth your time.
And my response:
Dear student,
You’ve probably had a lot of teachers who have fed you lessons and learning with little reason behind it. I know I did when I was growing up and it made me crazy. I hope I don’t do the same with you as your teacher, although there are going to be times when it may seem as if I am making you do things that are isolated and out of context. I hope to keep those activities to a minimum. Sometimes, we need to lay the groundwork for better things to come.
I want you to care about what you are doing because caring people shape this world for the better. You may be young, but you have a voice, and I want to help you find that voice and use it as best as I can. You should care because your interest and curiosity now will set the stage for an intriguing life later on. You should care because all of us have something inside us that drives — all of us are poets, all of us are scientists, all of us are musicians — and you nurture that kernel of being by caring for the world and yourself.
I can’t help you answer this question alone, though.
You need to be on the journey, too, and let me help you with your explorations. Let me show you how caring looks and then maybe, hopefully, you’ll see how one person can impact another in a positive way.
Sincerely,
Your Teacher
This site is intriguing and good use of congregating data collection across a wide variety of sources. How accurate is it? Not sure. The site is called Worldometers and it claims to have real-time stats on a variety of issues from across the globe. (Read about its gathering of numbers, if you want to dig a bit deeper)
There are some interesting stats about the environment there that are just plain sad to read, particularly how much forest areas are being lost and how much junk is being pumped into the air by companies.
But this area interested me. It shows media and publishing.
What do you make of a world where more cell phones are sold in a day than books that are published in a year? And just look at the number of email messages sent, number of Internet users and blogs posts. Fascinating. And are there really still that many newspapers around? You’d think there were only a handful left if you read the news about the news.
This high school freshman lays out the rationale for gaming and learning. She talks about character development, story development and interactive immersion into other worlds as learning experiences.
My school district is launching into a two year Literacy Initiative and part of that push is to send a bunch of us to a conference called Literacy for All in November (right before I head to Philly for various National Writing Project and National Conference for Teachers of English conferences).
The Literacy for All Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, has a lot of interesting sessions and many seem very useful to me as a teacher of writing and reading. I can’t wait to gain some new insights and some new approaches, and be part of the conversations. Now, I know this Literacy for All is not a technology conference, but you would think that in this day and age, there would be some technology integration into some of the topics and workshops being planned.
Right?
Wrong.
As far as I can tell from the descriptions of the sessions, there is a complete absence of the digital world reflected in the workshops being presented at Literacy for All. Isn’t digital composition the platform for real writing that kids are doing outside of school and shouldn’t that be reflected in some of the ways we approach teaching? I think so.
I’ll contrast that to the NWP and NCTE meetings that follow Literacy for All, where much of the focus will be on ways that technology and digital tools are impacting the writing process and how teachers are using these concepts to engage their students in new and interesting ways.
I am looking forward to Literacy for All, but it just made me wonder …
I live in a pretty cool neighborhood. We have all sorts of parties and gatherings and plenty of families. Last night, one of the neighborhood teenagers and his friends put on a rock concert on their front lawn. This four piece band of high schoolers (called Menivest Destiny) played to a packed lawn of friends and neighbors on a beautiful summer night with a full moon shining down.
Unlike my old days of playing in a high school rock band (China Grove, Rolling Stones, etc), these guys were incredibly hip. Amazingly so. Here are a few bands they covered:
Fountains of Wayne
Cake
Semisonic
Cold Play
Cold War Kids
Red Hot Chili Peppers
and some others that I sort of recognized but not really.
I had a neighbor come up and whisper, “Do you know any of these songs? Because I don’t. I feel old.”
Yep — rock and roll.
Here is a clip from Youtube of Meninvest Destiny from some school event and they are playing an original song they wrote:
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