Young Writers Project is excited to be working with you in the coming year. This site has undergone a few changes since last year:

• Teachers can now grade individual posts and comments.
• Teachers can leave private 'annotations' on student posts that only the student author can see.
• Images can be placed inside the text of a post.
• A new editor, spell checker and a few other changes make the site move more quickly.
• Coming soon: The ability to directly record a podcast to a post rather than having to go through an audio editor.

Additionally, YWP has expanded its staffing to add four teacher coaches who will work with schools during the year:  Darcie Jensvold Abbene, Nick Brooks, Cindy Faughnan and Kathy Folley, all veteran teachers who've worked extensively with digital classrooms.

STUDENTS: While this is a 'school' project, we hope you will use this space to share your ideas, creativity and work. As with all YWP projects -- and your school -- there is one primary rule: Be civil and respectful. You are also encouraged to participate in youngwritersproject.org or respond to the prompts on that site for potential publication in newspapers around the state or on Vermont Public Radio.

NOTE to TEACHERS: YWP will set up the user accounts for you.  Please send us  an Excel spread sheet listing ALL students with three columns: Firstname | Lastname | Grade. Send that spread sheet to ggevalt@youngwritersproject .org  THANKS!

You will be setting up your own digital classrooms -- don't worry; it's quite easy and will probably be quicker than sending us your class lists. And we have a video and text walk through on how to do both: In the HELP section, you will see information on how to a) Set up your individual classrooms and the tags system and b) to add students' usernames to your new classroom.

-- Geoffrey Gevalt, YWP Director, 802-324-9537