The DWP '00 Invitational Summer Institute About the 2000 Institute The Dakota Writing Project once again tried something new, expanding its usual three-week summer  institute to four weeks. We felt that this would allow for a more in-depth experience, one that would stick with teachers long after the summer institute had ended. Teachers wrote extensively, learned effective ways to fuse writing and computers in the classroom, shared ideas and responded to each other's writing, tried our hand at teacher research, drank coffee and ate great treats, learned from exciting guest presenters, and most importantly, learned from each other and themselves. These talented individuals discovered that they were both writers and teachers and that they could help students to discover the writers in themselves. When the Summer Institute ended, our teachers came away inspired, determined to continue to improve the teaching of writing in their own classrooms and to share their ideas with other teachers.   Materials/Information provided to the teachers Organization: The DWP '00 Schedule. This was our schedule for the summer institute, which we naturally departed somewhat as the institute progressed. Guest presenters: Guest presenters to the Dakota Writing Project's Summer Institute included South Dakota poet Penni Pearson, who gently led us into writing and sharing poems of our own; high school English teacher Sue Morrell (South Dakota's English Teacher of the Year and a DWPer), who asked us to ask ourselves (and, eventually, our students) four important questions (Why write? What have I learned about writing? How do I write? What are the qualities of good writing?) and then to share our responses; technology coordinator Cyndy DeMers (also a DWP teacher), who motivated us to write our own brochures, using computers; Dakota Wesleyan University's Tim Baxter-Ferguson, who showed us how to revise a flawed fairy tale, making revision fun; and Shirley Brown, who came to us from the Philadelphia Writing Project, to spend the day focused on teacher research and helping us to come up with valuable questions for our own teacher research. Rubrics (Guidelines for Excellence) for the Summer Institute: We are in the process of revising our rubrics for the Summer Institute, inspired by a book we're using for the Summer Institute: Creating Writers: Linking Writing Assessment and Instruction, by Vicki Spandel and Richard J. Stiggins. Eventually, we may put these rubrics and related materials online. MOO Activities: We met with the Marshall University Writing Project online twice during the summer institute at the Diversity University MOO. It was a wonderful way to connect with teachers in a completely different part of the country and be writing and collaborating back and forth. We found the link below quite helpful. A Gentle Introduction to MOOing. Techie Stuff: Teachers who attend the DWP Summer Institute had the option of receiving six hours of graduate credit, which includes three hours for technology. So some of our activities focused on the fusion of writing with technology: This year's schedule includes participating in the National Writing Project's E-Anthology, reading and responding to messages in the forums (see the newsletter for a sample) and sharing some of our own writings in the NWP's E-Zine space. We collectively created an issue of the Dakota Writing Project's newsletter, each of writing articles and other pieces for it, which the teachers e-mailed as attachments to the editor. You can view this issue of the newsletter as an Adobe Acrobat file; We did a bit of MOOing with the Marshall University Writing Project, discussing an article we'd both read (an article on assessment published in The Voice, a publication of the National Writing Project) and sharing ideas about teaching; We also did some peer revision on computer, sent messages on our own listserv, and explored and evaluated websites/databases in connection with information literacy, an important aspect of writing and research in the age of computers.