The National Writing Project and Google Docs have teamed up to offer high school teachers and their students a wonderful opportunity to kickoff the school year with a collaborative writing project: Letters to the Future President. The project invites students to write about issues they would want our next president to address, and to publish their writing for a national audience.

I’ll be heading to Florin High School on Tuesday to help a group of students and their history teacher get set up for the project.  Here’s my agenda:

• Introduce project via NWP website
• Show Lee Lefever’s Google Docs in Plain English
• Have students create Google accounts
• Have them create gmail accounts – with names teacher can readily recognize (e.g., johnd@gmail.com vs. baddude@whatever.com)
• Invite several students into Google Doc I’ve projected to screen and give live demo of inserting comments, hyperlinks, etc.
• Have students create their Google Doc (in this case, students will work collaboratively in teams of 2-3)
• Have teacher explain naming conventions so that can readily distinguish each group’s letter from the rest.
• Q & A – and call it a wrap:-)

Hats off to the many great teachers who embrace the concept of writing to make a difference and to the organizations that support them in their efforts to take their students’ voices to the word.