Englewood, Co – StudentPublishing.com has announced free publishing programs for schools through an online book making application. Students can author and illustrate an entire storybook or contribute a page to a classbook. In the storybook program, each student receives a free paperback in return for making extras available to their family.  With the classbook program, each class receives a free hardback book for making copies available to student families. Only 10 or more students in any grade from k-8 are required.

The online book tool is unique in that no program needs to be downloaded or installed. That can be quite useful in most schools given that network security has locked out or limited that capability. It also allows students to work on their project from any computer with an Internet connection, including the one at home.

The tool itself is geared especially to elementary aged students who login directly to their own book or to their page within a classbook. A good set of drawing tools are provided along with hundreds of paint-able backgrounds and sticker outlines. These outlines facilitate the making of an attractive illustration, while still reflecting each student’s creativity through their placement and coloring. Students can also upload photos and hand drawn illustrations, if they prefer.

StudentPublishing.com asserts that these publishing projects have a tremendous impact on students and their parents. In fact, their site includes testimonials from teachers as to not just the quality of the finished books, but the tremendous incentive and motivation they give to students. Five year customer Angie Kelley said, "Writing stories can be hard for some students, but when I tell them, ‘Your work will be published in a book,’ they get so excited and really engage in the process! As a teacher, you know you’ve connected with students when they come to class the first day hoping to write and publish stories." Apparently other teachers agree. The company just won the Learning^â Magazine 2010 Teachers’ Choice^SM Award for the mail-in version of the Storybook program which, though not free, does include professional typesetting of the students’ stories at no extra charge.

The company is a division of Creations by You®, makers of the tremendously successful and highly acclaimed retail product, IlluStory® - Write and illustrate your own book. The 17 year old kit has won 9 educational product awards and is still a top seller at retailers such as Amazon, Target and Barnes & Noble to name a few.

Additional Information:

For more information on programs please visit www.StudentPublishing.com.

Social Psychology Network, a nonprofit educational organization funded by the National Science Foundation, recently released a web-based learning resource on the topic of segregation, and we're writing to let you know about it:

http://www.UnderstandingPrejudice.org/segregation

Building on the work of Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, this new interactive resource shows that small social preferences at the individual level can generate surprising patterns of segregation at the group level, and equally important, that the dynamic can be reversed to reduce segregation.

Everyone knows that prejudice can lead to segregation -- to the separation of groups by race, gender, or other social categories. It was this type of segregation that Rosa Parks fought in 1955 when she refused an Alabama bus driver's demand that she move to the rear with other Black riders.

But why does segregation still occur today in schools and other places where people support social equality? Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling proposed an answer in the 1970s, writing that racial discrimination arises not only from behavior that is "heartless, selfish and illegal" but "from the magnification of small incentives into massive results."

To find out what he meant, click here.