Last night I emailed the first draft of the 6-8 book to our publisher and today I am taking a few moments to reflect on the process so far. Four of the five books have been submitted and the last book is close. The first editing meeting for the k-2 book is this afternoon.
The working title of the books in the series is Now Classrooms k-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 (this will change in the process). The books are organized in grade bands starting with kindergarten the books scaffold through high school. There is also a leadership book that has a framework to keep any discussion about technology use stay focused on teaching, learning, and data, before talk about devices and the boxes and wires.
Partnering with Solution Tree Press we started planning this series about 18 months ago. I asked some of the busiest teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators in the Chicagoland area to join the writing team. There are 27 of us writing together, and what an adventure it has been! The series of books will be available late summer-fall 2017. We are all so excited!
Even though I have seven books already published, I learned so much during the process of working with these talented educators. Here are a few things I learned:
- I will never write another book alone, it is so much more fun and productive to work with a team.
- I can’t imagine how this process would have ever worked without a G-Suite type of environment.
- You have to dream big and select the best team leaders to focus the work of each of the teams.
- Most of the writing meetings were at my house and I really enjoyed planning and cooking fun meals for the writing teams. It was a great break from planning meals for picky eaters!
- There are fantastic, hard-working, creative educators that are willing to go above and beyond by participating in a project like this for their own personal professional development.
I hope once we live through the editing process we all still smile as we think about our time together collaborating, laughing, eating, and working for hours and hours outside our “day jobs” as educators.
#Awesome!
Meg Ormiston
@megormi