Hi, I’m Andrew Plemmons Pratt. I am the Program Manager for New Classrooms in Washington, DC. (Though opinions expressed on this site are entirely my own.) I taught 7th-grade English in Prince George’s County, Maryland as a member of the 2010 Teach For America corps. I write about literacy & education technology here at appratt.com. You’ll also find posts on industrial archeology, YA book publishing, and bread baking.
My writing has also appeared at EdSurge, TheBillfold.com, and TFA’s Pass The Chalk blog.
Before joining the 2010 TFA corps, I was the managing editor at scienceprogress.org, the science and tech policy magazine at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, DC-based think tank.
As a second-year teacher, I piloted a new model for teaching 7th-grade English using a class set of iPads. These provided students with access to high-interest ebooks, digital graphic novels, blog software, and a customized Learning Management System that offered digital classwork and multimedia. You can read about some of those experiments in the edtech101 category.
Creating connections between teachers, social entrepreneurs, and policy makers is a personal passion. It fueled colleague Matthew McCrea and I to launch the first EdcampDC in January 2012.
Before entering the classroom, I spent two and a half years managing the start-up phase of sciencesrogress.org, a magazine of progressive science and technology policy published by the Center for American Progress. A portfolio of some of the writing, editing, and production work I did is available here.
Editing technical jargon into accessible prose and building websites led me to the simple conclusion that working in the current economy requires students to develop their literacy skills in a digital context. I helped successful lawyers, scientists, journalists, and other professionals leverage online communication tools to change the world around them. The young minds in our nation’s schools deserve to wield that same power.
I completed the BA/MA program in English at the University of Virginia. There, I wrote about literary theory and visual culture and cut my web-building teeth on digital humanities projects.
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Hi, I'm Andrew Plemmons Pratt. I am the Program Manager for