Get Connected On World Read Aloud Day With #WRADCONNECT

On March 7, 2012 we will be celebrating World Read Aloud Day with the world.  

The theme this year says it all....

Change the World, Story by Story

This amazing day is sponsored by LitWorlds, whose mission is, "to use the power of story to cultivate literacy skills in the world's most vulnerable children through Education, Advocacy and Innovation."

Through social media such as Skype, Twitter, and Facebook we will come together to celebrate the power of words and stories on our lives.  

This year we thought it would be fun to mix it up a little and get our secondary students involved.  I contacted my friends Michelle Luhtala, library department chair at New Canaan High School Library in Connecticut, Joyce Valenza, teacher librarian at Springfield Township School in Pennsylvania and Rocco Staino, contributing editor for School Library Journal and chair of the Empire State Center for the Book. We gathered students who were interested in being part of our WRAD group. 

The WRAD Connect group at Van Meter....Lizzy, Quinn, Collin, Paxton and Sebastian.  Meg and Alisa are also members of our group.

At the Springfield Township, a lot of the same members of #SWVBC came together for WRAD too.  

It's a personality-rich group! ;-)

In New Canaan, from left to right, our group includes Michael, Charlie, Molly, Alex, and Isabelle -  Franci and David are missing from the picture, but we'll catch them soon.

And then we put our student groups together in Skype.  It was so great hearing the ideas and plans they immediately started developing for World Read Aloud Day....

and so much FUN too. 

We decided that a cool name was needed for this group right away.  They decided on #WRADCONNECT.  Two of Michelle's students, Michael and Molly created a WRAD Connect Facebook Community Page and 

WRAD Connect Group on Facebook. 

They will use the hashtag, #WRADCONNECT when they tweet to connect with other schools taking part in WRAD.

We have created the "Change the World, Story by Story" wiki.  This is the place where we will stay organized since we are at different schools and need to depend on this tool and others.  We will post different resources and artifacts as well on the wiki. 

We started collecting video clips for the project - recordings of people responding to the prompt, "Tell us about a story that changed your world." The following video is a compilation of four Van Meter students' responses.

The Story that Changed My World from michelle luhtala on Vimeo.

We invite everyone to contribute to the clip collection. Videos can be uploaded to the Facebook page, to Flickr, via email, or anywhere else! Short and unrehearsed is preferable - people of all ages, clips in all languages are welcome! We created a form for contributors to fill out, so that we have an "inventory" of WRAD contributions, regardless of where they are published. Here is the form. 

Our students will collaborate to co-present WRAD activity on March 7. They are contacting authors and other students to interview between 11AM and 2PM. They will also feature selected video submissions. The entire program will be broadcast live. We'll post a link as soon as we have one. 

Michael is developing a schedule of WRAD activity

As we look ahead to the year and all of the events in front of us, World Read Aloud Day is definitely one that will bring excitement, fun, and new friendships to our students and school communities.  

And we hope that you will tune in on March 7th to WRAD CONNECT and celebrate will us.