Thursday, July 28, 2011

The HBWReads Blog is Being Featured at the #140edu Conference

On Tuesday, August 2nd, I have the privilege of speaking at #140edu: Exploring the State of Education NOW Conference at the 92nd Street Y, NY, NY.  My topic: The Buzz Books.  

A while back, I was asked by the conference founder, Jeff Pulver, to participate in this conference, and if so, what did I have in mind to talk about.  Immediately, I thought of the Buzz Books and the HBWReads blog.  Reading, to me, has been a difference-maker in my life, taking me from a place of shadows and ignorance, to one of luminosity and understanding.  

Scholars have recently been examining the state of reading today among the general population of children in grades 5-12, and the statistics coming out of their work paint an awful picture.  There are extreme ramifications upon our society if we raise a generation of non-readers.  So, we as a school, looked at what we thought of reading in general, and more specifically of summer reading.  We looked at reading phenomena like the Harry Potter books, the Twilight Series, and more recently, the Hunger Games trilogy.
We saw something there that caught our eye.  

Reading is a social endeavor, and it's done best when we can talk about books with people we have an interest in.  When we read a book that is outstanding, the first thing we want to do is to run and tell someone who matters to us all about it and recommend it to them.  We wanted to capture that somehow.  

When I get on stage on Monday, I'm going to talk about that idea, but I am also going to talk about the work that has been done by all of the students and teachers at the site so far this summer.  Looking back at the statistics I shared the other day, we have had wild success in terms of readers and traffic through our site.  We have had conversations around books that would not have otherwise occurred.  We are making reading viral, and helping to spread it through not only our community here in Verona, but also in other parts of the county and world.  Don't underestimate the power of your thinking.  

The conference will be live on the web, and as soon as the information is posted as to how to tune in, I'll pass it along here.  (Here is the Ustream address if you are interested in catching the conference.  I go on roughly at 11:45am)

Keep up the great work!

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