On this week's Teachers Teaching Teachers, we followed up on two collaborative projects that some of us have been working on: a new Drupal site for Youth Voices and "Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future"

Paul Oh stopped by to report on the launch of the Website for teachers, which allows us to post student writing to the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website. Paul Oh directed us to the website where: "At the secure area of that site, you will be able to log in using your Google account information. Once you do so, further directions will help you manage your students' pieces that were published using the special project submission
template described in Step 2. At that point, your students' work will be publicly visible along with all the writing from across the country."

Several teachers have tip-toed into Youth Voices, and on this podcast we report on the mechanics of joining this site and creating groups. Listen in, then consider having your students join us.

We invited several teachers and student to come talk about the site. In particular we talked about how to use the groups function of our new Drupal baby. (Thanks Bill Firtzgerald!) For
example, we set up a Digital Photography Community Group and a literature-focused inquiry group, "Catastrophe and Resiliency":

A space where we can take a stand against historical and current atrocities, genocides, ethnic cleanings, holocausts, occupations, and wars. A place to share our responses to books and stories about how humaity can not be stopped by these catastrophes, and how we must never again turn away from these disasters. A forum where we can connect around books, stories, and poems at all levels of difficulty and variety, books like Long Way Gone, What is the What? Persepolis, Maus, Night and other stories of spirit in the face of calamity.

Lindsea, a student from Hawaii joined us, and many others.

Looking for collaborative projects? Want to find out more? Listen to this podcast, and join in the coming weeks as we continue to plan together on Teachers Teaching Teachers.

On this podcast we talk with four guesrts about Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an exciting collaborative project sponsored by the National Writing Project and Google:

• Andrew Chang, Product Marketing Manager at Google
• Gail Desler, Tech Liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in Northern California
• Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, co-director of the National Writing Project
• Paul Oh, the coordinator of the technology liaison program for the National Writing Project

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. The project requires that the teacher have a parent/guardian permission (PDF) on file for each student prior to publishing their work on the Web and requires that students and teachers have Internet connectivity and use or create a free Google account.

Google accounts allow teachers and students to use Google Docs to compose, collaborate, edit, and share writing through Internet-accessible documents. The Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website provides a secure way for teachers to publish students' publication-ready writing to a high-profile website intended to feature strong, well-reasoned, and persuasive writing by young people.

Interested teachers should read How to Participate and then register [at http://nwp.org] by September 12. Publishing of student letters and essays occurs through October 30, 2008. Please note, in order to register for this project, you must first have an account on NWPi,

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future

For the Chart Log, click Read more, below.

This is the first of two shows in November in which we are going to sandwich the National Writing Project's Annual Meeting with two special Teachers Teaching Teachers webcasts/podcasts, one before and one after the Annual Meeting: Nov. 15–17,

For this show we invited Writing Project Technology Liaisons who are coming to present in New York City to join us to give us a taste of what will be happening at this vital conference.

Listen to learn what it is that brings us together each year. Learn more about how Writing Project teachers are using digital storytelling (or digital composing) in their classrooms, in summer youth camps, and with other teachers in their local Writing Projects.

Joining Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Lee Baber, and Woody Woodgate on this week's special Teachers Teaching Teachers were

• John Bishop, Red Clay Writing Project
• Clifford Lee, Bay Area Writing Project
• Bonnie Kaplan, Hudson Valley Writing Project
• Valorie Stokes, Prairie Lands Writing Project
• Paul Oh, National Writing Project

Bud Hunt and two staff members (technology leaders/thinkers/organizers/teachers) from the National Writing Project (NWP), Christina Cantrill and Paul Oh got together with us to discuss questions that Bud had raised on the NWP’s Tech Liaison Listserv.

This was a discussion between Bud Hunt, Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, and Jeff Lebow–along with Paul Allison, Pat Delaney, Susan Ettenheim, and Lee Baber.

We invite you to listen to the podcast, and also read the collection of voices on this post, dealing with similar questions: