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A couple of weeks ago I was in a waterfront hotel in Vancouver BC where I received a Lifetime Achievement Award from AAAS/Subaru Science Books & Films. It was certainly a validation, a crowning moment, (here’s the video) but awards are a funny thing. If one is truly engaged in life, it’s the struggles that are the focus. So right now I’m thinking about what happened this past weekend.

We are midway through the school year and about half of the authors participating in iNK’s pilot project, where we are collaborating with both teachers and students of Bogert Elementary School, have completed their missions. Roz Schanzer worked with two fourth grade classes. They had to learn about New Jersey’s government, a somewhat dry subject. But under Roz’s direction they produced an amazing book called The Golden Government. You can read a rave review of the project from teacher Heather Santoro here. Dorothy Patent worked with two fifth grade teachers. Read what Chris Kostenko said about that experience here. I worked with Carla Christiana and Alicia Palmeri on the solar system and we’re about halfway through the unit. I’ve written an article about our experience that will be the lead feature in the April edition of Science Books & Films but you can see the effect on student learning in this video where the kids are exclaiming over the NASA website. What we’re doing is groundbreaking because of its scale, its intimacy, and the effective timing of the conferences so that we are truly transforming the learning of the children. That’s where the rubber meets the road in education. It’s far more effective than a school visit, which generates enormous interest and excitement, very little of which is channeled into the work kids do in the classroom every day.

I may be a little impatient, but I want people to realize that using children’s nonfiction authors and their books as a resource for education produces powerful results. So whenever possible I’ve been submitting proposals to conferences to present our work. The conferences are NOT library conferences. (Librarians have their own problems trying to get classroom teachers to use nonfiction.) I’ve been sending in proposals to conferences for teachers of technology. I figure that many schools have videoconferencing equipment sitting around, gathering dust and the techies in charge of the equipment are looking for reasons to use it. It stands to reason that they’d like to find something that their classroom teacher colleagues will appreciate. Maybe this is a kind of oblique approach to marketing but hey, I have an experimental nature. I have no illusions that my reputation as an author is meaningful to technology teachers. Basically, I’m starting over, a humbling experience. So finally, after being rejected twice by the BIG conferences ISTE (international Society for Technology in Education) and NYSCATE (New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education) I was finally accepted, for this past weekend at a little regional NYSCATE conference in Wappingers Falls, NY (about an hour from my home.)

Wow! This was exciting news. So I lined up Bogert’s media specialist, Heidi Kabot, and Dorothy’s two teachers, and Roz and Dorothy, to hang around their computers on a Saturday afternoon, so I co

Last Wednesday evening I did an interactive videoconference with Marc Aronson’s Ebook and App class of graduate students at Rutgers. It was a terrific opportunity for me use a technology medium to elaborate on what the Authors on Call group of Ink Think Tank is doing in its pilot project with Bogert Elementary School. (Some of the results are starting to come in and if you want to watch them unfold, you can go to the project’s wiki.) Since Marc is a vocal advocate for nonfiction literature in his SLJ blog, I was somewhat surprised to find that so many of his students seemed unaware of the struggle to get schools to use nonfiction literature in classrooms as the primary reading material and to use its authors in a timely and productive way to enhance the learning of both teachers and students. We, readers of this blog, who are committed to nonfiction literature as authors and educators, are all inhabitants of a “bubble” where the use of nonfiction literature is prevalent. And, since we mainly talk to each other, we can delude ourselves into thinking that it is more widespread than it actually is.

This month, I’ve also been travelling—first to Doha, Qatar where I attended the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) as I did last year, and then, a week later to Israel with a delegation of school superintendents. (50 hours in the air, don’t ask!) At WISE I attended a workshop where a study was presented to see how the delivery systems of reading material—i.e. print vs digital—affected literacy. Conducted by www.educationimpact.net, the results, it seems, are equivocal. In some countries kids learned more from books and in others they learned more from a screen. I finally raised my hand and asked, “What were these kids reading?” No one seemed to know. I then made the point that not all books are equal and not all digital materials are equal. I gave them an example of how to write to engage readers. At the end of the session a number of people asked for my card.

I was at WISE wearing my journalist’s hat, covering the conference for Education Update. I did a video interview of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He was extremely interested in what iNK (not a typo, we’re getting new logos, thank you Steve Jenkins) is doing in its pilot project. His organization is tackling some major issues world wide—like poverty, disease, ignorance and global warming. I asked him, “What can be done to accelerate change?” In a nutshell, Sachs said that networking is very important but, in addition, you must act—do something to prove that it works and acts as a model for others to follow. (You can see my three minute interview here.)

In Israel, we visited schools that are making breakthroughs in serving minority and impoverished children and in technology in the classroom. But, again, nowhere did I see evidence that there is attention paid to the quality of classroom instructional material. The lessons I observed seemed very pedantic and traditional. It’s almost as if no one is taking a hard look at instructional material.

At the end of my session with Marc’s class a student asked me, “How can I help?” I see ver