Halloween, Hurricanes, and Las Vegas!

The Delaware-based side of ReadWriteThink faired the recent Sandy storm well. We look around at the destruction that just missed us to the north, and our thought go out to those who were hit hard my the hurricane.

Halloween has now come and gone, and with it, my sugar rush.

And that moves us closer to NCTE's convention in Las Vegas next week! Whoa! I've never been to Las Vegas before, so this is really exciting for me. I not only get to represent IRA, meet with the NCTE team, and have a fabulous and productive dinner with the RWT Advisory Board, but I get to see Vegas! AWESOME!

OK, business. What have we been up to here?

Word Mover (which I have mentioned before) is now out on iTunes! It's free and it's fun, so download it, create some poems, and share them with us.

This week had us preparing a webinar presented by Doug Buehl, one of IRA's authors (DevelopingReaders in the Academic Disciplines and ClassroomStrategies for Interactive Learning). More information about the webinar can be found here.

I've had several chance to meet Doug over the years I've worked at IRA. He's a great speak, very interesting, and I think pretty funny. He's got a great whit. He's also very knowledgeable.

We're still very focused on what the next big thing for ReadWriteThink will be. We are pondering a mobile-friendly version of the site, but we need some feedback. Is it even a good idea? If so, what areas should be mobile friendly? How do we best present information in the mobile format?

We'll have a survey coming out to better help us decide how users will use the information. I hope to have some more info after the group meeting and advisory board dinner in Vegas.

Hmmm? What was that? How did the 5k race go?

Thanks for asking! It went horribly! It was my worst 5k time ever--I'm blaming the 15lbs of gear I had on as part of my costume.

Wes

Showing Off the Apps

Every other week at least? Really, Wes? Really? (My coworkers will get that joke....)

Yeah, it seems that the blog I had planned to write last week should have been written and posted last week to keep up with my goal of posting AT LEAST every other week.

Alas, alack!

I'll make up for it this week with pretty pictures and cool announcements.

Announcement 1: Trading Cards: The App is going live for iPads! The exact date is not known, but I am submitting the interactive to iTunes today for review. We're guessing it should be up and out there for download in a couple weeks <fingers crossed>.

And now for a pretty picture:

Sample of the Trading Card App printout

This is a final print out of a Fictional Person card from our interactive. I made this during testing, so it is a bit quick and dirty, but I thought it was pretty cool, so I decided to use it here.

The App allows used to add in their own pictures to the top area--I grabbed this one online. I believe it was one of the promotional posters for the movie Sucker Punch.

Note that me mentioning this movie here in how way reflects ReadWriteThink's view of the movie nor the views of any of the other editors or our parent organizations. I thought the movie was AMAZING! I was expecting a shallow, action-packed thrill-ride and found something that blew my mind. Haunted me for days! I'm not going in to any of my theories here in this post, but I did enjoy the movie so much that I made a couple cards based on the it, hence the Rocket card you see.

The App also allows for users to pick from a variety of styles for the card. I liked this one for Rocket because it is less stylized--which leans more focus on to action-packed image!--and does have a little softness and femininity in the way the purple fades, but is still a bold and vibrant color.

OK, that is image and announcement 1. Onto number 2.

RWT's second app, spear-headed by the NCTE team, was released to us last week for our first round of testing and it wicked cool! It is based on our Word Movie interactive but goes well beyond that in functionality and shear awesome. Similar to the interactive, you have a passage from a famous work from which you can select words to make into found poetry.

Unlike the interactive, it looks sleek, makes the words from the passage look like magnetic poetry strips, and has text from a few famous works preloaded, and has a large word bank that can be used instead of famous works. Users can also add their own words in case they have a particular list they need/want to use.

I have absolutely and totally NO permission from the NCTE team to post this picture, so I hope they won't get mad at me for doing so, but the initial testing  went so well and the app looks great; I wanted to show it off.

I call this poem Play on Words. Get it?

I didn't do much of a poem; some of my other works were longer. You can see the word bank is on the bottom, pops up and down into the work space. There are different background options as well. The words can be resized (I made them large since I was only using 2), rotated, and colored. The fonts can also be switched. Lots of options.

Again, this is alpha build stuff here, so things might change before it is finished and released.

For next time, maybe I'll see if Lisa or Christy want to chat about the latest interactive they have been working on, a redesign of the Print Press.We were testing that recently, too, and I'm excited to have that one released on the site. Very useful, very full-featured, and it looks great! I think the final release is scheduled for early September--but if I can get either of them to take a turn at posting here, they can probably give an actual date.

That's it for now. I'm out!

Wes

Are we there yet?

No. We certainly are not there yet. But we will be there Friday!

By we, I mean the IRA team of ReadWriteThink.org, and by there I mean Chicago. Lisa and Christy, on the NCTE side, arrive Sunday morning. They are driving in from elsewhere in Illinois; I don't envy them the day they will have that Sunday--the five of us are in meetings all day after their few-hour drive! I do, however, envy them the time savings.

ReadWriteThink.org is presenting two sessions this year at the IRA Convention.

Engaging Learners With “Games” in the Elementary Classroom
Presented by Katrina Allen, Karen Pelekis, and Emily Manning
Monday, 3:00-4:00 pm, W180, Convention Center

Incorporating Tools Across the Curriculum
Presented by (our very own!) Lisa Storm Fink
Monday, 3:00-4:00 pm, W176B, Convention Center

The team will be at both of these, so if you have a pressing desire to meet us, you can do so then and there, and we'd love to chat with you! Also, one of the clues to the scavenger hunt is going to be at the sessions; another good reason to swing by.

Becky and I are both doing back-up duty at the IRA Bookstore in the exhibit hall, and Christy and Lisa work at the NCTE Booth in the exhibit hall. I'm not sure about the locations, though. Maybe I'll tweet those out on the RWT tweet feed when I know them.

In other news, an article about our Bright Ideas for Summer recently published in IRA's Reading Today Online. Lot of good information about the program in there. We're really excited about it, and we hope to get a bunch of parents working with their kids over summer on these projects.

I still have a lot to get done before I can leave for Chicago, and not a lot of time left to do it since I leave Friday. I better get back to work!

Hope to see you in Chicago!

Wes

Poems and QRs

 

In honor of national poetry month, I shall recite (um, link to) a few of my favorite poems:

The Jabberwocky by Carrol Lewis
Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning

And since I can't find a link to the specific section of Fox in Sock, I shall simply list one of the my favorite lines from the Dr. Sues book:

"When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles...

...they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle."

I have tried to keep this line memorized, but I often screw it up in the quoting. It's tough.

And now I shall ramble about what I am currently working on.

Have I talked about QR Codes yet?

Hmmm, seems like I mentioned them two months ago and never mentioned it again. Bad, Wes! Bad!

QR Codes are funky looking little blocks of black pixels that can be scanned with most smart phones and tablet devices if you have the right software/app. If you look up QR Reader or something similar in iTunes or Google Play or what have you, you'll likely find several for free. You scan the code with the app and then are magically whisked away to a website.

Go on, give it a try, I'll wait.

Yeah, right from your monitor--it should work!

Pretty neat, right?

Anyway, at IRA's Convention in Chicago this year (this month!), ReadWriteThink is hosting a little scavenger hunt. We've got 5 different QR Codes printed on posters scattered around the Convention Center. While some of the QR Codes are repeated, they are color coded as well; each of the different colors will reveal a code word that completes a sentence.

Find all the words, complete the phrase, and send it to us for a chance to win!

"What if I don't have a smart phone?"

Excellent question! Each of the posters also lists the URL of the clue word--just copy that down and go that that webpage, you will see the clue.

Being the generous guy that I am, I'll even give you a heads up as to where you can find all the clues--you just need to get there and scan the code (or write down the URL).

The Green clue is at the International Reading Association's Bookstore in the exhibit hall.

The Red clue is located at the two ReadWriteThink.org sessions.

The Blue clue is located at the the National Council of Teachers of English's booth in the exibit hall.

The Grey clue is located at the entrance to the exhibit halls.

The White clue is located in your IRA Convention program.

Other than the white, none of those colors are even remotely close to the correct shade, but you get the idea.

If you are going to be at IRA's Convention this year, keep your eyes open and your phone at the ready.

And all of the RWT editors will be there too, at our sessions or our organization's booth/bookstore. Stop by and chat! We love to hear from our users.

Wes

Headed out to the NCTE convention!

The ReadWriteThink team is meeting up in Chicago this weekend for one of our few-times-a-year face-to-face meetings. We meet up at the NCTE convention and the IRA convention. Always fun, and it's great to interact with team members in person from time to time. We'll be fleshing out next year's work plan, so I hope to come back with some juicer tid-bits about what we will be up to.

It's been a crazy-busy time here as we try to wrap up this year's objectives. A lot of my time has been spent on the K-W-L Chart Creator, which I have spent a lot of time talking about here. It's not final yet, but it is coming soon, and I'm going to share the beta with you. If you have any feedback on it, feel free to drop them into the blog comments!

I've heard tell of a sweet little deal going on at IRA right now, a Recruit-A-Member program. You invite your coworkers to become a member, and--if they accept--they get a free trial online membership...and can win some cool prizes, starting at a discount on your own membership renewal. The more people you recruit, the better the prizes.

Check it out! Seems like a great way to share IRA resources with colleagues and win a little something for yourself!

I feel like there is a bunch more stuff going on at IRA now--I definitely have more I could fill in here, but I'm a little swamped for time. My flight leaves in 2.5 hours, and I need to be heading out to make sure I make my flight.

Hopefully I'll have a little bit of time for a couple new updates next week before the holidays, but I'm only in Wednesday, and likely a lot of that is going to be spent following up on emails and voice mails.

In case I don't get back to this before Thanksgiving, have a great holiday!

Wes