To Whom It May Concern:

Student Press Initiative (SPI) at Teachers College, Columbia University, endorses ClassroomAuthors as an innovative way for teachers and students to experience the collaborative book publishing process. By using ClassroomAuthors’ advanced web-based technology, classrooms are transformed into virtual publishing houses, and students begin to fully understand rhetorical purpose, rather than simple task of writing. Both SPI and ClassroomAuthors are dedicated to providing teachers with essential tools to engage students in the writing process, and to improve literacy skills for real-world applications.

SPI offers one-week Summer Institutes where teachers learn to create inquiry-base curriculum following guiding principles of Community Connections, Genre Study, and Purposeful Writing, During this intensive training teachers learn how to incorporate writing-for-publication into their curriculum, and explore various genres, ways to foster community connections, and the power of purposeful, audiencedriven writing.

Teachers attending the summer institute will be introduced to ClassroomAuthors’ tools. They will learn how to use the innovative online collaborative publishing system, which will enable them to easily create professional publications of their students’ writing and, in so doing, “go public” with their students’ work and share their voices with the world.

The teachers will walk away from our institutes with new strategies for their classroom publication projects, as well as free access to ClassroomAuthors.com to immediately begin experiencing the power of student publishing.

In the last eight years, SPI has published over 100 books of student writing and teacher curricula. Our greatest challenge has been a question of production: how might we provide more schools with cost effective production services? ClassroomAuthors has answered that call by building cutting edge design templates that make it possible for teachers to truly publish their students on a bake sale budget. They greatly increase our capacity to serve teachers and students in New York City, across the country, and even on an international level. SPI not only endorses ClassroomAuthors, we applaud them as an innovator responding to the rapidly changing demands of teachers and students in the 21st Century.

Please feel free to contact me if you need further information on this extraordinary organization.

Sincerely,