It's been crazy around here!

It's been Trading Cards, Trading Cards, Trading cards all the time around here! This last week has been a flood of writing and rewriting the guiding questions for the trading card interactive. I've taken several stabs to start us off, and the team has been very good at trimming the questions down. I tend to be verbose--it's my curse. As an editor, I'm pretty good at trimming stuff down to concise phrasing (though, admittedly, not as good as Becky!), but as a writer I am very long-winded.

"We know, Wes. We've seen it on your blog."

Ah, yes. First hand experience. Well...let us continue on then, knowing what we are all in store for.

The Trading Card interactive is in its final stage of revision, and the then the last step--once all the functionality is properly placed--is to fill in the test. We're getting close. My hope is to have the questions finished by the end of the week, and the interactive live by the beginning of next week. I'm behind schedule, but we'll be close.

I do have a preview, though, of the final card:

From this snippet of the final (beta) product (and yes, there are some errors there: Wes is not actually a fictional person, despite how much he might sound like one from time to time), you can see one of the cool new features: the ability to add images!

That is a picture of me grilling on my  patio. I think this was taken in response to "How does the steak look?" I was able to upload this picture into the card and save it there. A much-asked-for feature now included!

This is only one of the many new features introduced in the new card creator. The card type is Fictional Person. As you might guess, this means there is a Real Person card as well. There is also a Real Place card and a Fictional Place card. Also, Object, Event, and Abstract Concept.

We've added a way to group up to 8 cards as a collection and save them all as a single set. For example, I could make the Wes card (Real Person), a Grill card (Object), a Patio card (Real Place), a Hunger card (Abstract Concept), and a BBQ card (Event), and save them all as a Memorial Day Weekend collection. In place of writing an essay "What I did for Memorial Day," I could make a collection of cards and turn that in instead!

I think it's a really great improvement over the old interactive. We hope teachers and parents find some interesting and creative uses for the cards--and if so, let us know!

Wes

Wes's Highlights From IRA Convention

I only got to see two sessions at the Convention this year, but they were both awesome! I'm a little bias in my opinion, though, being that both sessions where the ReadWriteThink sessions and I'm a ReadWriteThink editor. But hey, there it is!

I spent a good chunk of the rest of my time at IRA's Bookstore. If you were there, I was the one happily scampering about saying, "Can I help anyone find anything? Answer any questions for you? Make up completely false facts about Chicago?" Towards the end, that last one became, "Recite some poetry?"

Yes, that options was picked a couple times.

Yes, I did actually recite poetry for attendees.

I also got to visit with some of IRA's authors! Jan Miller Burkins and Valerie Ellery both had book signing sessions in the Bookstore this year while I was there.


Jan is the author of IRA's Prevented Misguided Reading, Coaching for Balance, and Practical Literacy Coaching, and she's one of ReadWriteThink's authors too, having done a few strategy guides for our site.


Valerie is the author of IRA's Creating Strategic Readers, which I had the pleasure of copyediting back when I was a Production Editor in the books department at IRA.

In case it wasn't completely obvious, I'm the one who appears both pics.

I also got a chance to chat with Doug Buehl (Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines, Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning), Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Diane Lapp (Text Complexity, In a Reading State of Mind--which I also worked on), but no one conveniently walked by with a camera to snap a shot with me with them.

I do enjoy being able to catch up with authors at convention--wonderful people full of energy and a true passion to educate. Always striving to do more to help teachers help their students.

Wes

Getting back to work

And now we are back! What a busy-fun week that was. I had hoped to get a couple blogs posted from convention, but I didn't have time during the day and didn't have a computer with me at night. I could have done it from my phone, I suppose, but I don't care for writing anything long that way.

Maybe next year I'll have some sort of tablet device with me.

I thought the IRA Convention was a smashing success. I got to talk a bit to Kenny and Riley from Page Turner Adventures -- always fun to see them. Didn't get a chance to get in any shoots with them this year, though. Drats! Another missed opportunity to saturate the the 'net with more of me!

[Collective sign of relief heard from all other RWT Editors--and every other coworker around me]

Our two sessions were packed this year, standing room only. That was pretty cool. Big thanks to our presenters for making the sessions a success. The sessions were taped, and the links will be shared online soon, so if you missed it, you'll be able to catch them.

And now that I'm thinking back to it, I should have taken some pictures of people scanning out QR code! I heard from a few attendees that they had a lot of fun looking for the RWT QR codes we had scattered around the convention. We're still tallying entries, and should be alerting winners soon.

A lot of things were left in the works while we were gone, and now that we're back, they are ready for review and further processing. The redesign of the old Character Trading Card interactive, for one. I've already been playing with the new card creator this morning, and I am thoroughly liking it! I hope to share that link out with you later this week, once we've had an internal review. I'm excited about this one!

There's always more to talk about, but that would put me in to more long-winded than usual, so I'll stop now. More convention and post-convention updates later this week or possibly next week.

'Cause it is going to be a busy week!

Wes