Writing Project site leaders around the country are looking for ways to join forces with like-minded collaborators to provide learning opportunities for teachers and students. In this episode of NWP Radio, we heard from Writing Project site leaders about some innovative approaches to educational partnerships that are working locally.

This show brought together authors of Reading in a Participatory Culture (2012) and the complementary digital book Flows of Reading to discuss what it means to be a reader and writer in an increasingly participatory culture. Both books exemplify an expanded concept of the term "text" and model a new type of reader—one who reads across different media and understands reading as an act of sharing, deconstructing, and making meaning. We hope this helps open a conversation about what "counts" as reading and all the kinds of reading we perform in our everyday lives.

How does writing today facilitate connections among ideas? People? Disciplines? The response to these questions were the focus of this year's National Day on Writing, celebrated on October 21 with a Tweetup utilizing the hashtag #write2connect. We talked with Millie Davis of the National Council of Teachers of English, Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month, and leaders from local writing project sites and discussed the genesis of #write2connect.

"Take it from an educator—or thousands" is the call of this year's Connected Educator Month set for October 2013. A partner of the NWP through our Educator Innovator initiative, Connected Educator Month (CEM) seeks to broaden and deepen educator participation in online communities of practice and move towards a more fully connected and collaborative profession. This NWP Radio show explores what it means to be a connected educator in the 21st century, what the implications are for Writing Project sites today, and how to get involved in CEM in October and connect with the larger Educator Innovator network throughout the year.

In this episode, we talk with directors and teacher-consultants from the San Jose Area Writing Project about their recently released book, Teaching Writing Grades 7-12 in an Era of Assessment: Passion and Practice. The authors discuss the book and their answers to two questions posed in the opening chapter: "Why might my students wish to engage in the performative activity of writing?" and "Why might they wish to engage in this practice with not just dogged persistence, but with genuine passion?"

We know that summer typically means face-to-face institutes occurring around the country. This summer we also saw an explosion of NWP-related activity in two online spaces: the E-Anthology and the Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (#clmooc). In this episode, site leaders explain the work at the center of these two spaces and describe their participation, and the participation of their site colleagues in these robust communities.

Three Writing Project sites were fortunate this summer to be hosts to educators from South Africa in their invitational summer institutes. Listen in for an opportunity to hear from our South African colleagues about their institute experience and how they expect to share what they are learning and doing with teachers in South Africa.

It is a truism that supportive school administrators are critical to successful professional development. But what does "supportive" mean on a daily basis at the school? On this show, we hosted three pairs of Writing Project sites and their school administrators and talked about the variety of ways that school administrators help make professional development effective.

Listeners to this show will hear great examples of writing from The Best Teen Writing, a collection of stories, essays, and poems written by teen authors awarded medals in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. We also feature teachers discussing a new online community, Vision and Voice , where teachers in grades 7–12 can share inspiration an ideas from The Best Teen Writing.

Summer is almost here and that means that the Summer of Making and Connecting is heating up! Listen to this episode of NWP Radio to hear about the summer's line-up and the various ways that educators around the country are writing, making, and sharing while putting Connected Learning principles into practice. Guests include Paul Allison (NYCWP), Karen Fasimpaur (P2PU), Cindy O'Donnell-Allen (CSUWP), Paul Oh (NWP), and Stephanie West-Puckett (Tar River WP).