RRVWP in Washington

The Red River Valley Writing Project is represented at the annual National Writing Project Spring Meeting in Washington, DC. And the above picture is proof ---(from left to right) RRVWP Director Kelly Sassi, NWP Executive Director Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and RRVWP Teacher Consultant Karen

Taylor.  

The meeting began March 25, 2015 and concludes today, March 27. Here's a bit about the meeting:

Always an exciting event, the meeting gives Writing Project teachers and leaders an opportunity to share their classroom successes with members of Congress and with each other. (from NWP's website)

Thinking about NWP

The National Writing Project annual report is available. To begin reading it, click here.

NWP also reminds us about the significance of teachers. Take a look:
TEACHERS PLAY A VITAL ROLE in leading sustained efforts to improve learning in our schools. NWP teacher-leaders study and share effective practices that enhance student writing and learning, work collaboratively with other educators, design resources, and take on new roles in effecting positive change.

Upcoming NWP webinar on Creative Commons

Join us to chat about Creative Commons (CC), its licenses, and how CC-licensed Open Educational Resources are being used in K-12 education. Share your experience using CC in the classroom. If you're new to CC, come learn more about it from other teachers and CC staff member, Jane Park, who will give a brief overview of CC and some of its applications to K-12, before asking the hard questions to kick off a lively discussion about teaching and learning with open educational resources.

The above comes from the National Writing Project website, a great resource for connecting with NWP and its programs.

Here are the essentials on the webinar:
 When: Thursday, June 26, 12:00 p.m. PDT/3:00 p.m. EDT 
Where: Teaching and Learning with Creative Commons, A Webinar at Educator Innovator

Digital storytelling in a new era

Elyse Eidman-Aadahl on Writing in the Digital Age (Big Thinkers Series)

Co-director of the National Writing Project Elyse Eidman-Aadahl describes how the craft of storytelling is evolving, as new digital tools and communications technologies enable connections for content creators around the globe.

(from Edutopia)

The summer of learning is on its way

Education in America needs to be more powerful if we want to prepare all our children for the real world. We need a learning approach designed for our times – one that builds on the basic “three Rs” of education to add what is, and always has been, the fourth R: Relevance. Today that means preparing young people for an ever-changing world where higher-order skills are in demand and learning never stops. We call this learning approach Connected Learning.

This summer, major advocates for the potential of the Internet – including theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla, the National Writing Project, and others – are putting Connected Learning into practice. The Summer of Making and Connecting organizes hundreds of events, projects and programs in communities across the nation, around the world, and online to help youth connect learning to their interests and to enable teachers to learn from and network with their innovative peers. The campaign will engage hundreds of thousands of people in creating things on the web, with hardware, and on paper—working in schools and community spaces and at kitchen tables. The campaign brings together organizations from the worlds of DIY, making, writing, and learning to build the Connected Learning movement. (from the "about" page at the Summer of Making and and Connecting website)

A place to write and respond

2013 E-Anthology

MAY 15 – SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

The NWP E-Anthology is a social media forum that invites members of the National Writing Project Community to publish their writing and reflections and to respond to the work of colleagues. This year's E-Anthology will be hosted within theNational Writing Project Google+ community . (from the National Writing Project website)

Write and sing

The Central Texas Writing Project, in partnership with the Cheatham Street Foundation, will be offering a Young Songwriters' Camp for students. The camp will help students develop their own original songs and educate them about different aspects of the music industry. (from the National Writing Project website)

The National Day on Writing is here

Today is the National Day on Writing, a terrific opportunity to devote some time to writing. And the National Writing Project website is teeming with resources to help you celebrate today. To explore those resources, click here.

Here's a bit from Wikipedia on the history of writing.

True writing, in which the entire content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development, and is distinguished from proto-writing in that the latter typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it difficult or impossible to confidently reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance.

New report on what makes a teacher great

"The students in this report provide clear advice to all adults committed to the education of young people," said Sharon J. Washington, executive director of the National Writing Project. "Effective teaching begins with an understanding of how students learn best and why teaching matters. I so appreciate the ideas and insights these students bring to the education reform conversation." (at NWP's website)

To read more, click the above hyperlinked text.

Money possibilities

Several high-profile teacher-training and -professional-development groups that recently lost federal set-asides—from Teach For America to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards—will have an opportunity to recapture some of that funding under the terms of a newly unveiled $25 million federal competition. ("Programs Suffer Cuts in Funding," March 9, 2011.) (Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week)

The National Writing Project is referenced in article from which the above hyperlinked text comes.