Young Writers Project

Updated: 10.24.09
Young Writers Project is a Vermont-based nonprofit dedicated to helping students write better. Strong writing skills are essential for learning and success, and YWP works directly with students online, in school and at its headquarters in an old mill in Winooski, Vermont.

Young Writers Project has more than 45 Drupal sites, all in Drupal 6, that have more than 11,000 registered users in Vermont and small parts of New Hampshire and New York State.

Our biggest use of Drupal is in the YWP Schools Project: YWP builds and supports Digital Writing Classrooms for schools to use as private, online extensions of their classrooms. Presently YWP has Drupal installations used by 46 schools and some 6,000 students, more than 12 percent of the state's student population in grades 4-12. To learn more about this project, go to: ywpschools.net. You can login using the demo / demo convention to get a better sense of some of the sites' capabilities and examples of how schools have used these sites.

The Digital Writing Classrooms are the roll-out after three years of piloting in schools. The sites are spare and relatively graphics-free to reflect that many Vermont schools still have slow Internet service and antiquated computers. As part of our service to schools, we train teachers to use digital technology in their classrooms, train them to use our sites, offer workshops to students and

The YWP Schools Project and its Digital Writing Classrooms is extremely appreciative of many in the Drupal Community -- including developers of modules such as Revisioning and Workspace for helping us out.

It's primary student writing site is a social network based on the community's efforts to help each member improve as writer. The site:
youngwritersproject.org has approximately 5,400 registered users -- mostly students aged 13-18, as well as teachers and college students who serve as mentors. The site is protected by Mollom and allows student users to blog, comment, engage in forums, upload photos, podcasts and videos. In the last year, students have created 35,000 blogs and stories and have exchanged 80,000 comments to each other.

Students also post finished work on the site for consideration for publication in any of six daily newspapers that carry YWP student work each week. Since becoming a nonprofit in late 2006, YWP has received more than 16,500 submissions and published nearly 3,000 students' work. (Keep in mind there are only 92,000 k-12 students in the entire state.)

YWP runs several other Drupal sites:

• digitalteachers.netA new site that serves as an online site for YWP's Master's Level Practicum in Digital Writing Instruction for teachers.
• And several other sites for special projects on ballad writing, comedy writing and sites devoted to student trips to China and Rwanda.

Our biggest issue as a nonprofit is time, knowledge and money. As to Drupal, we wish that more attention was given to its useability -- We really think that Wordpress has leapt past Drupal in this respect and hope that future versions will give more consideration to the end users rather than to developers/coders. Robust is nice but intuitivity is nicer.

We've also managed to raise our knowledge thanks to Lullabot and countless developers and Drupal community members who've responded to forum postings, directed us to video podcasts and instruction and who've actually made module tweaks to accomodate our needs.

If you would like to know more, please contact me
geoff gevalt
director, young writers project