What Happened to April?

Wow. I lost a whole month!

Usually in April I am blogging about the International Reading Association's annual conference, and how ReadWriteThink is hosting sessions there. And where I'll be so you can come see me.

Alas, I failed. We went to San Antonio, we spoke to the teachers, we had an in-person team meeting. And I got a cowboy hat. And Becky laughed at me.

Here's a way to show this in a graphic representation:

I'm not the only one who fits in the center, though.

Whoa! Look at that! A Venn diagram!

Yes, that's right, after talking about it for a few months now, we have our new Venn Diagram interactive live on the site.

The iPad and Android versions are in production and (fingers crossed!) will be out by the end of May, maybe June.

We have a list of our interactives we are trying to turn in to apps for tablets (to avoid the whole Flash-does-not-run-on-iOS-systems issue) as well as list of interactives to be updated with the work saver. I'll get into more detail with those once we have deadlines and designer approval for our ideas and workplan.

If it all comes together, it will be very exciting.

Next time, I'm going to go in to our summer plans for this year. It's pretty cool, and we are very excited by the partnership we were able to strike up for this project.

But for now, all you get--other than the handy link to the new Venn Diagram interactive--is a picture of me photo-bombing some poor conference attendees. Don't worry, they totally got another picture without me in it.

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

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

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

The Scoop From IRA

September is right around the corner: Back-to-School Time.

There's a lot going on at IRA this time of year, too.

We have the September issues of The Reading Teacher and the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy coming out after the summer hiatus. The Reading Teacher just went through a complete redesign and has a new academic editorial team, Diane Barone and Marla Mallette. I haven't seen the proofs (hmmmm...maybe I'll go snooping through the publication servers and see if the pdfs are up...), but what I have seen looks pretty neat.

The new Reading Today is getting launched in September. The team has been crazy-busy with that endeavor, and it looks great! I'm excited to get my hands on the final copy. The website should be going live September 6th at www.reading.org/readingtoday. How's that for a little insider scoop? If you click that link before Sept 6th, you will see a Reading Today site, but it isn't the new Reading Today site, so make sure to check back.

On the ReadWriteThink end, we do try to set up some Back-to-School events or lessons or something, but being a website, we're always updating and uploading and improving the site. Summer's not too different then the rest of the year.

Back-to-School time is also IRA Convention time.

Now for the conventions group here at IRA, it is always convention time. It's a lot of work planning out an event that big, getting presenters in order, figuring out keynote speakers, arranging all the events, planning the travel and housing arrangements, working with exhibitors and the convention center. WHEW! I get tired just thinking about it.

But right around this time every year is when convention stuff starts to materialize in other places around IRA. For instance, the new convention website just launched. Very exciting! And if you want a walk-through for the site, we have you covered in the first episode of Convention Insider--where you can get all the inside scoops to IRA's 57th annual convention in Chicago (April 29 - May 2). Convention Insider will be a monthly video episode to give you all the inside information about Convention 2012.

ReadWriteThink has it's own convention projects as well. Not only do we have meetings with out advisory board and our NCTE partners, we try to meet up with some of our contributors and host our own sessions at convention. At the 2011 convention in Orlando, we had two sessions: Globetrotting With Blogs and STEM Poetry. I've heard a lot of good feedback about our sessions so far. If you were there, feel free to drop a comment right here and let us know what you thought.

If you missed out on either session, either because you didn't make it to Orlando or just didn't make it to our session, that's  just fine. We are putting them up online for you! STEM Poetry is up as of right now, and the Globetrotting With Blogs will be up this week, I think.

You will also be able to read more about Globetrotting With Blogs in the new Reading Today when it comes out next week. Our presenters, Laurie Henry and Lisa Zawilinski, have an article in the upcoming issue.

I think that will do it for this bit of blogging. A look into what's new and what's coming up in the new few weeks from IRA.

This is Wes Ford, your IRA (and Convention) Insider--I'll see you next time!

Comic Books and Graphic Novels: Gateway Books

I don't mean to steal thunder from Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey, so I won't. You'll get the big scoop on graphic novels in the class from them in an up-coming IRA member's only article. Keep your eyes out for it--it's a good one!

Their article got me thinking. First about how my love of comic books persisted throughout my youth. I still read graphic novels, though I indulge less in the monthly superhero stories and go for a big stories, the more complex tales geared to more mature readers. Watchman is an amazing comic for that. As is The Sandman. Neil Gaimen is one of my all time favorite authors; whether it be his novels or his graphic novels, the stories he weaves inspire and amaze me.

I am an avid reader and still an avid reader of graphic novels.

But that isn't what the article really got me thinking about. It took me back much farther than that.

When I was young lad back in first and second grade (and a big apology to all my grade school teachers--I must have been a terror in class back then, but please realize all your efforts paid off!), I had trouble reading. In fact, I had to get tutored a couple times a week to catch me back up to grade level in between second and third grade (and a big thank you to my tutor, and especially to my parents who took the time make sure I caught up).

It's hard to think of myself that way now, someone who didn't read much. I don't recall not enjoying reading, but then I don't recall much from back then.

Anyway, what this article reminded me of was me sitting in my local library (which was a tiny thing, but Mom took my brother and I there often), sitting on the floor next to a spinning rack of soft-covered books. Comic books. Mainly Peanuts--I would sit there and read one cover to cover and then go for the next one. Over and over. Probably read the entire collection a few times a month.

Mom mentioned recently how, at the time, she thought I was just looking at the pictures. She was surprised when I would start describing what was happening with Snoopy and poor ol' Charlie Brown. She said something about how at the time some of my teachers said they weren't level-appropriate, but Mom figured if they kept me reading it was worth it. And they did. And it was.

Yeah, I did need to get tutored to catch me up, but I got hooked on reading before then, and I think already having that foundation of enjoyment in reading helped. It kept me going. It gave me a reason to want to read better because I already knew reading could be fun. I just had a hard time doing it.

After the tutoring, I got into the Three Investigators series and my love of reading really took off from there, but that's a story for another time.

That was my little trip down memory lane, remembering how that rack of Peanuts comic books start me on the path to being a life-long reader--and an editor at the International Reading Association and ReadWriteThink.org. They were my gateway books into the literary world. I hope all young readers out there find that gateway into the world of reading.

Let me end with a huge thank you to Charles M. Schulz, creator of the Peanuts, as well as everyone else out there who managed to get kids reading--authors, illustrators, teachers, and tutors. You're doing the world a huge favor, and your efforts are worthy of praise. Thank you.

Do you remember your gateway book? Perhaps that one series when you were young that grabbed and hooked you as a reader?

Wes