About the Literacy Workshop

Formerly known as the MiddleWeb projects list, our community became The Literacy Workshop (TLW) in November 2005. Our Reading and Writing Workshop Project is still going strong, as over 350 educators with an interest in early adolescent literacy (Gr. 4-8) swap ideas and explore new strategies together. To become a part of this community visit our list page. Below is a timeline of the development of our online community.

October 2006
TLW officially announces the availability of classroom web tools such as blogs, discussion boards and webspace for teachers and classrooms. These tools are available with a variety of paid memberships and feature various levels of security to fit school and district needs and guidelines.

September 2006
TLW and MiddleTalk members were deeply saddened to hear the news of the passing of Juli Kendall, one of the early leaders and founders of our online communitie. We have set up a blog to share memories of Juli and what she has meant to teachers and students she touched online and in person.

Spring 2006
Our second rendition of the popular poetry slam project. This year’s project featured 12 middle level classrooms. Students wrote over 450 poems for this project and the student poems received more than 2400 comments.

November 2005
The MiddleWeb projects list became Literacy Workshop. The community moved permanently to this location with the assistance of John Norton of MiddleWeb and Keith Mack, a former middle school teacher who provide technical and design assistance for the new location. Our Reading and Writing Workshop Project is still going strong, as over 350 educators with an interest in early adolescent literacy (Gr. 4-8) swap ideas and explore new strategies together. To become a part of this community visit our listserv page.

September 2005
Bill Ivey, Humanities teacher at Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Massachusetts, took over Juli’s role as list moderator. As the transition evolved, we explored an idea of creating a web space dedicated to this community.

Fall 2001
MiddleWeb invited interested persons from our MiddleWeb daily discussion group and visitors to our website to join in a year-long discussion about struggling middle grades readers. Juli Kendall, a literacy teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, moderated the discussion and kept a weekly journal of her own work with fifth-graders who were held back after they failed to meet the district's minimum reading requirement for promotion to sixth grade.