The YWP blog

There are a lot of reasons we have not been able to get to this blog over the last year:

• Very busy. As you'll see from the numbers below, it's been a busy and productive year.
• Technology. This site was housed on another server and we just could never find the time to move it to the new server, which may be another way of saying we didn't have time.

Well, we're back.

And this is the beginning of what we plan to have as regular posts to give you more detail than a Facebook or Twitter post or link, to give you some information behind what's going on at Young Writers Project.

So a whirlwind update on the year gone by using numbers, and a few words:

• 8,000 submissions to our Newspaper Series, all read by Lee McIsaac and anonymous students.
• 1,000+ students published in 9 newspapers each week during the school year.
• 165 teachers and 6,500 students on our digital writing classrooms as part of The Schools Project this past year. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: There was a great disparity of use of the site -- many used it regularly others didn't.
• 4,000 active students on our student-led Web site, youngwritersproject.org
• 700 students had visited youngwritersproject.org at least once in the first month of summer vacation (compared to 200 over the same period last year).
• $196,000 the tentative final budget for the year; pretty incredible when you figure that on a per-student-touched basis.

So what have we learned?

• Newspapers remain a viable way to empower students when they are published; with circulation declining with daily newspapers, we are adding more weeklies.
• Because use of our digital sites was inconsistent, we are beefing up our training program in The Schools Project and adding monthly visits to help teachers transition into using technology in authentic ways in their classroom. We also hope this will increase the amount kids write in schools!
• We need to build capacity: There is much to be done and much demand for our services, but we don't have the staff to jump on it.

It was a great year. We'll try to highlight some of the great things teachers and students have done in the coming days, weeks and months.

-- geoff gevalt

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