If you are connected in any way with the National Writing Project (NWP), then I bet the scenario below is a familiar one: On Tuesday I had an email from Skye Smith, a first grade teacher in my district, who wondered if I could offer her a bit of help using Movie Maker 2. In [...]

The tag cloud in my right-hand sidebar basically sums it up: NWP (National Writing Project) is central to my professional life. In my 19 years in public education, the professional development I have received through the NWP is the single most important resource in my teaching toolkit. In case you are not familiar with the [...]

I won’t know for about 6 weeks if I passed the California Teachers of English Learners (CTEL) test , which I took yesterday at CSU, Sacramento. Taking the CTEL is an all day affair, if you’re planning to take all three sections. I signed up for all three. From the parking lot, I joined a [...]

Just got the call from A3WP colleague Lesley McKillop to check the list of winners for the 2010 NAESP grant…We’re on it: Prairie Elementary’s Bird Chasers Project! The grant will provide a set of field glasses and cameras to Lesley’s 4th graders. Last week, the students embarked on a year-long field journaling project that will [...]

I’m headed to the Capitol this morning to fight for our EETT ARRA funding. CUE director Mike Lawrence sums up the issue in a sentence: “California directed schools and districts across the state to spend millions to support Educational Technology, then failed to distribute the over $72M in stimulus funds to pay for it!” Having [...]

I choose my battles carefully. But I’m definitely jumping in on this one: On February 1, the Obama administration released its 2011 budget proposal. In this proposed budget, funding for the NWP is consolidated with five other literacy programs under a new states-based competitive grants program that provides money for improving literacy. The NWP as [...]

The subtitle for yesterday’s Academic Literacy Summit was Writing to Think and Learn in All Content Areas. Definitely Giving Voice to Students was also an common thread running through all sessions – starting with my EETT team presentation Integrating Digital Literacies into Upper Elementary Classrooms . Our lunch break was amazing. Students from the Sacramento [...]

The great films have not been made yet. The ones who will make them are out there, though, riding a skateboard.” – Robert Altman Why would a classroom teacher at any grade level or in any subject area consider adding one more activity into an already jam-packed curriculum? This is a question I ask myself [...]

I first learned of the Bay Area Writing Project when my daughter was in 2nd grade at Rooftop Elementary School in San Francisco. At a PTA meeting, teachers enthusiastically shared how a summer institute across the bay had completely changed the way they would be delivering writing curriculum to their students. And I remember my [...]

Before the Winter Break, I introduced the 4th grade teachers in my EETT grant to blogs and blogging during a 3-hour whirlwind workshop. With only a week left before vacation, already several went “live” with their blogs and invited their students to post comments, noting that their students immediately took to blogging. One of the [...]