One of our notable accomplishments at 826LA is giving students the chance to play with the technology they might need one day as working authors. Just as our volunteering handbook says good writing isn't always born out of lightning and thunderbolts (i.e., it's not instantaneous), we believe good writing education isn't always done with the quill and inkpot. You may be following our blog, our RSS feed, our online journalism content, or our occasional YouTube offerings. One of our students, Cammeron, 13, even tweets from the Venice Writing Lab.

Many of our school offerings merge old and new ways of writing, too. We go into classrooms and sometimes bring lucky classrooms to 826LA, where they have great tools at their disposal. Just a couple of weeks ago, two classrooms from West Hollywood Elementary came with Mr. Acosta and Mr. Vasquez to tackle a Storytelling & Bookmaking field trip. Ordinarily, our typist works on a Mac while our illustrator draws by hand, but for this field trip, we test-ran an idea from one of our pro instructors and past Volunteers of the Month, Brick Maier. Brick's already known to many of our students for teaching Tabletop Moviemaking. He took a stab at doing illustrations digitally, on a Wacom Graphire pen tablet as students came up with a plot.

Brick writes:

I arrived early to test out the projector, Photoshop, and pen tablet setup. Satisfied, I used a high-tech cup of pens in front of the projector to conceal my work with the group. Nearly 40 kids poured in, and I found a curious gallery of students had strategically placed themselves directly behind me to check my progress. I am used to working under deadlines, but I could barely keep up with the ideas for these stories. Every 15 minutes or so I would come up for air and reveal what I had been working on. It was fun for them to see characters emerge from their collective story. My final showing was received with a general round of applause. One observant student suggested that the bucket of bananas used for the bow and arrow to fight the evil spider should have a bit more yellow. Fair enough. A bit more yellow it is.

We turned the morning group's story into an illustrated book, The Day the Brothers Saved Their Sister. Here's a little piece:

Once upon a time in the future, on a planet called Magoogle, there lived two apes named Bob and Max Janette. They were brothers and partners, and they had a golden flying car. They really liked to race their golden flying car, and they also liked to watch TV. The brothers were generally very happy. However, the brothers were very competitive and would sometimes get into fights… One day Tracy stole the keys to the golden flying car and took it to her boyfriend Boogle's house.