On January 27, we held our first Vermont Writes Day a non-legislative designation for a day that is not particularly noteworthy other than being the birthday of Lewis Carroll. (For more about our Vermont Writes Day II, go to the story on this blog or to vermontwrites.ywpvt.net)
What we wanted to do was to see if we could get schools, teachers, students and staff to stop what they were doing and write -- for just seven minutes. We offered three suggested prompts: "Dear President Obama..." or "I am really good at ..." or "Listen..." (For more about Vermont Writes Day I, click here.)
This first attempt at galvanizing the state to write was extremely successful. We know of at least 54 schools that participated or approximately 12,000 students plus teachers, principals, staff, parents and guests. And, of course, Gov. Jim Douglas went to Spaulding High School in Barre to write with the kids there. A big thanks to him. Word was that he said it was more difficult than signing a veto.
We went through hundreds of the "Obama" submissions and sent to the President about 150 posts and a few pieces of art. If we get a response, we'll share it with the students. Here are a few things we learned from the experience:
- Everyone we spoke with loved it, thought it was great fun and wants us to do it again. I presume there are some out there who thought the idea was wet and don't want to do it again, but oh well. Too bad.
- An amazing number of elementary schools participated. One kindergarten class teacher videotaped her students reading and posted it online.
- Another teacher has created a blog to have students post drafts of their work before they submit to YWP. Here's the link: young-writers-project.blogspot.com/
- Many schools stopped everything and had everyone write for seven minutes, including parents and guests who might be in the buildings.
- The Web site we built -- vermontwrites.ywpvt.net -- was set up to have anonymous posting AND anonymous commenting. We had ZERO spam. Why? Cool new invention from Dries Buytart, a Belgium sofrtware designer who invented Drupal -- the open source software we use for our sites. His new spam product: Mollom.com. It works! And we're using it on this site.
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Submitted by ggevalt on Thu, 02/05/2009 - 00:51
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