Your Name and Title: Geoffrey Gevalt, Connecting to the World Begins at Home -- Young Writers Project in the classroom 1 p.m. (Eastern) WEDNESDAY http://tinyurl.com/d24o7we
School or Organization Name: Young Writers Project, Inc. (an educational non-profit)
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Vermont, USA
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Middle-High Schools
Short Session Description (one line):
The first step that’s often forgotten: Connect kids with their classmates and neighbors, help them learn to express themselves with civility and clarity; and then connect with schools around the world.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
YWP is an educational nonprofit devoted to helping students write better by providing them digital spaces to share work, give and receive feedback and learn more about each other. We provide extensive mentoring to teachers and help them transform their teaching to use technology and deepen engagement of students.
We consider our work so far a kind of Global Internet Education 1.0: We help schools that are not digitally savvy use digital tools in authentic ways; and we help kids in rural areas foster digital communities, connect with mutual respect, take risks and learn about each other in the process. We are a young organization (five years) and are now embarking on our next step: Connecting these students with students around the world in a substantive way. We have opened sites with schools in Shanghai and Uganda and will be connecting those students with students in Vermont.
This session will show what students -- and teachers -- are doing in both formal and informal digital learning spaces. We will discuss what we are learning about students' natural affinity to be civil and positive in digital environments and how we have achieved that. We'll show you some of the students' work -- which is remarkable -- and you will see that what we are doing could be done by any teacher in most any digital platform that allows free exchange.
We also will show how using RSS feeds of news from around the world can be incorporated into a variety of curricula to make students both more aware of news elsewhere but also help them differentiate between accurate information, opinion and misinformation.
We'd love also to have time in this session to brainstorm with participants as to ways we can connect the developing digital learners here with students around the world. Because we see this online conference as an opportunity not just to tell our story, but to see if we can find partner schools who might be interested in working with us to pilot an in-depth connection with students here in Vermont.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:
http://youngwritersproject.org
http://ywpschools.net (and several private school sites within that domain)
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