Welcome

This site is designed to accompany my book, Bringing the Outside In: Visual Ways of Engaging Reluctant Readers. This work is about really seeing kids, and providing ways of using out of school literacies (i.e., digitial video or podcasting) to move our more reluctant middle and high school students to be more successful and engaged readers and writers. Where the strategies in the book range from pencil/paper activities to art to those involving computers, what's "housed" on this site are those technology-related exemplars or tools that couldn't come to life on the print pages of the text - along with new ideas that continue to emerge as the work continues.

Bits and Bytes

As this is a new website, please feel free to email suggestions or questions about content that you need to support your work with the strategies in this book. You can contact me at skajder@vt.edu

I'll be speaking about this work at several conferences over the course of the coming months, including the 2009 CCIRA conference, the 2009 Michigan Reading Association conference, the 2009 Best Practices Institute at UVA, Springboards (Montreal), and Bridges to Learning (Toronto), and multiple reading institutes and state-level meetings. More on each to come in the section on presentations.