Andrew Duval
@andrewduval.bsky.social
Layer enthusiast. Teaching middle schoolers to write at Frankenstories.org.
Recently spent 2 weeks in the US, teaching Frankenstories writing classes at 6 schools across 3 states. Feeling super buoyant; the students and teachers were so enthusiastic, and we learned a lot from each other. Here’s a video that captures a small slice of the classroom energy.
November 29, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Recently spent 2 weeks in the US, teaching Frankenstories writing classes at 6 schools across 3 states. Feeling super buoyant; the students and teachers were so enthusiastic, and we learned a lot from each other. Here’s a video that captures a small slice of the classroom energy.
I should really search for Frankenstories mentions more often otherwise I miss posts like this. 🧡
Carew Academy students celebrated #NationalStorytellingWeek with activities like Frankenstories, an online writing game helping students develop creative writing skills by building stories together in timed rounds, resulting in some excellent creative storytelling pieces!✍️
#CreativeWriting
#CreativeWriting
November 27, 2025 at 7:47 AM
I should really search for Frankenstories mentions more often otherwise I miss posts like this. 🧡
Reposted by Andrew Duval
A fab tool that we loved trying today. The kids engagement with this was through the roof and they used a success criteria which we made together to select the best answer! Interactive, meaningful, educational and engaging. We will be using “Frankenstories” again! ✨
We used the website Frankenstories for the first time to improve our sentence writing by focusing on accurate punctuation, strong vocabulary, and using similes and alliteration. We wrote and voted anonymously, and we can’t wait to use this tool to support our modeled and shared writing next term!✏️
October 9, 2025 at 9:06 PM
A fab tool that we loved trying today. The kids engagement with this was through the roof and they used a success criteria which we made together to select the best answer! Interactive, meaningful, educational and engaging. We will be using “Frankenstories” again! ✨
HOW TO ESTABLISH A DENTAL FLOSSING ROUTINE THAT WILL MAKE YOUR DENTIST WEEP FOR JOY
For everyone who voted for our SXSW EDU workshop on improv ideas for whole-class writing, here is the killer flossing advice I promised.
For everyone who voted for our SXSW EDU workshop on improv ideas for whole-class writing, here is the killer flossing advice I promised.
November 27, 2025 at 12:57 AM
HOW TO ESTABLISH A DENTAL FLOSSING ROUTINE THAT WILL MAKE YOUR DENTIST WEEP FOR JOY
For everyone who voted for our SXSW EDU workshop on improv ideas for whole-class writing, here is the killer flossing advice I promised.
For everyone who voted for our SXSW EDU workshop on improv ideas for whole-class writing, here is the killer flossing advice I promised.
SXSW EDU Update: Our "Improv ideas to transform class writing" workshop was accepted, so @biblioracle.bsky.social , Danielle Witten, and I will be in Austin on Mar 11 delivering something fun. (I hope.) Thanks to everyone who voted for us! 🎭 🎉 And...
November 27, 2025 at 12:41 AM
SXSW EDU Update: Our "Improv ideas to transform class writing" workshop was accepted, so @biblioracle.bsky.social , Danielle Witten, and I will be in Austin on Mar 11 delivering something fun. (I hope.) Thanks to everyone who voted for us! 🎭 🎉 And...
@thevogelman.bsky.social fyi I was spruiking Poetry Pauses at an Australian English teachers workshop last week. I recommended four books but said of “all of them, stop what you’re doing and buy Poetry Pauses, it’s excellent and will make you think about poetry in a cross-genre way”
November 23, 2025 at 9:12 PM
@thevogelman.bsky.social fyi I was spruiking Poetry Pauses at an Australian English teachers workshop last week. I recommended four books but said of “all of them, stop what you’re doing and buy Poetry Pauses, it’s excellent and will make you think about poetry in a cross-genre way”
Nov 13 I'm running a session on the foundational importance of narrative writing as part of the Seven Steps to Writing Success literacy masterclass series. The whole series looks good, so check it out if you're interested in writing and assessment.
bit.ly/48emWW9
bit.ly/48emWW9
Literacy Masterclass Series
bit.ly
October 10, 2025 at 6:39 AM
Nov 13 I'm running a session on the foundational importance of narrative writing as part of the Seven Steps to Writing Success literacy masterclass series. The whole series looks good, so check it out if you're interested in writing and assessment.
bit.ly/48emWW9
bit.ly/48emWW9
This is why I think school science classes should put much greater emphasis on *appreciation*. Few students will grow up to use info or skills from science class, but they will all have the opportunity to vote for a pro or anti science society.
Jennifer Doudna, 2020 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR gene editing.
“There has been a collective forgetting” of how life was before vaccines.
🧪Source: The Atlantic on IG
“There has been a collective forgetting” of how life was before vaccines.
🧪Source: The Atlantic on IG
September 20, 2025 at 9:20 PM
This is why I think school science classes should put much greater emphasis on *appreciation*. Few students will grow up to use info or skills from science class, but they will all have the opportunity to vote for a pro or anti science society.
No what should be illegal is Google inventing the format and then not supporting it in Slides
There’s one policy that Democrats could run on that guarantees they’d sweep back into power: making .webp images illegal
August 30, 2025 at 1:54 AM
No what should be illegal is Google inventing the format and then not supporting it in Slides
Maybe because Mississippi had Democratic governors during this period and ICE are recruiting Black officers.
I’m shocked Trump didn’t block this. It’s exactly the kind of history he wants to whitewash.
Thousands of pages dropped on how the DOJ, FBI, and Civil Rights Commission handled Emmett Till’s murder.
REMINDER: It all began with a lie from a white woman that became a death sentence for a Black kid.
Thousands of pages dropped on how the DOJ, FBI, and Civil Rights Commission handled Emmett Till’s murder.
REMINDER: It all began with a lie from a white woman that became a death sentence for a Black kid.
August 23, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Maybe because Mississippi had Democratic governors during this period and ICE are recruiting Black officers.
Hey, if anyone wants to do me a favour, can you pop over to the SXSW EDU Panelpicker and drop a vote for a workshop proposal I'm doing with @biblioracle.bsky.social and Danielle Witten?
Just click this link, create an account, and slam that heart button: participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
Just click this link, create an account, and slam that heart button: participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
August 10, 2025 at 10:30 AM
Hey, if anyone wants to do me a favour, can you pop over to the SXSW EDU Panelpicker and drop a vote for a workshop proposal I'm doing with @biblioracle.bsky.social and Danielle Witten?
Just click this link, create an account, and slam that heart button: participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
Just click this link, create an account, and slam that heart button: participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...
💯x 💯
Just weird to feel so pressured (by no one in particular, but by the policy context we’re all swimming in) to present this all as something so much more boring
July 15, 2025 at 2:05 AM
💯x 💯
💯
Think it’s important for public school teachers in particular to aim for definitions of reading that are as lofty as Thoreau’s, who said reading can make old ideas and stories become “carved out of the breath of life itself”
July 15, 2025 at 2:04 AM
💯
Testing new random text & image prompt pairings in Frankenstories and coughed up an almond on this one
May 19, 2025 at 2:29 AM
Testing new random text & image prompt pairings in Frankenstories and coughed up an almond on this one
Reposted by Andrew Duval
This op-ed is freaking beautiful and everyone should read it www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-...
An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy
Dear Mr. RFK Jr.,
(The “dear” is tradition. Don’t mistake it for affection.)
You said autistic children are a burden. That they ruin families. That...
www.mcsweeneys.net
May 13, 2025 at 7:01 PM
This op-ed is freaking beautiful and everyone should read it www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-...
Last week, I had a lot of fun presenting "Bot or Not?: The tell-tale signs of AI writing" at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English Middle Years Conference.
In the workshop, we tried to determine whether short pieces of text, in a variety of genres, were written by a human or an LLM.
In the workshop, we tried to determine whether short pieces of text, in a variety of genres, were written by a human or an LLM.
May 12, 2025 at 3:47 AM
Last week, I had a lot of fun presenting "Bot or Not?: The tell-tale signs of AI writing" at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English Middle Years Conference.
In the workshop, we tried to determine whether short pieces of text, in a variety of genres, were written by a human or an LLM.
In the workshop, we tried to determine whether short pieces of text, in a variety of genres, were written by a human or an LLM.
My boys are in their 20s now and some of my most cherished memories are the times we spent lying in bed reading Usagi Yojimbo.
Oh man I just find this deeply & utterly incomprehensible. Reading aloud to my children was a top-three life experience for me. I was gutted when they got old enough & no longer wanted it. I still miss it.
It is both intensely pleasurable & easily the best thing you can do for your kids.
It is both intensely pleasurable & easily the best thing you can do for your kids.
Most parents don’t enjoy reading to their children, survey suggests
Report from Nielsen and HarperCollins shows that parents see reading as a literacy skill, rather than something to encourage their children to love
www.theguardian.com
May 2, 2025 at 8:59 PM
My boys are in their 20s now and some of my most cherished memories are the times we spent lying in bed reading Usagi Yojimbo.
🙏 This was just one of those cases of everyone having the same core values.
If you want to give students an opportunity to actually enjoy a writing experience, check out Frankenstories, a social writing game/activity. I think it's so good I bought a vanishingly small part of the company. frankenstories.writelike.org
Frankenstories
A creative writing game for the whole class
frankenstories.writelike.org
March 26, 2025 at 2:01 PM
🙏 This was just one of those cases of everyone having the same core values.
As Brisbane-Home-of-Bluey gets hit with its first cyclone in 50 years, I think about how 20 years ago I worked for IAG, where CEO Mike Hawker tried to push the AUS gov on climate change policy, saying global warming will drive cyclones south and the nation is not prepared for a Brisbane wipeout.
March 5, 2025 at 2:44 AM
As Brisbane-Home-of-Bluey gets hit with its first cyclone in 50 years, I think about how 20 years ago I worked for IAG, where CEO Mike Hawker tried to push the AUS gov on climate change policy, saying global warming will drive cyclones south and the nation is not prepared for a Brisbane wipeout.
A while back, I had to work on a project in violence prevention and one of the most interesting pieces of research I read was from an anthropologist who had studied norms around parents beating their children in a particular community. When she asked parents if they thought they should beat their
this week's newsletter is a podcast with @lioneltrolling.bsky.social and @himself.bsky.social on the "malformed publics" of social media, among other things maxread.substack.com/p/the-silico...
![One piece we discussed that I want to call Read Max readers’ special attention to is Henry’s Substack newsletter on the “malformed publics” of social media, in which he argues that the social media-borne “misinformation” we should be worried about is not so much “fake news” that might brainwash or mislead people, but the distorted conception, inculcated by social media, of who our peers and fellow citizens are:
Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one. […]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:f6yzeddlu7zjqbthmn37yvom/bafkreicmgixthg2x5qohzw4d7p6eiwklr6dtcmcc23ynxrwyyv3l3qjxk4@jpeg)
February 28, 2025 at 9:42 AM
A while back, I had to work on a project in violence prevention and one of the most interesting pieces of research I read was from an anthropologist who had studied norms around parents beating their children in a particular community. When she asked parents if they thought they should beat their
Michael Lewis wrote a book called The Fifth Risk and if there was one takeaway, it was that the NOAA is an astounding feat of public infrastructure and should be protected at all costs.
The National Weather Service is THE ONLY source of weather data in the US. Every weather app, local broadcaster, and weather forecast map is based on NWS data from NOAA. This is a ridiculously stupid own goal for the US that will disrupt all kinds of social and economic activity, and endanger lives.
BREAKING: The mass firing of upwards of 1,800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including top climate scientists and weather forecasters, has begun.
The firings reportedly include workers at the National Weather Service.
The firings reportedly include workers at the National Weather Service.
February 28, 2025 at 2:56 AM
Michael Lewis wrote a book called The Fifth Risk and if there was one takeaway, it was that the NOAA is an astounding feat of public infrastructure and should be protected at all costs.
This is a great episode and gets to the heart of the real problem with AI in education, which is that for decades we’ve been teaching students to write like machines in order to meet the requirements of testing regimes.
I'm not sure I'm brave enough to listen to myself, but I'm part of this week's episode, "Playboi Farti and His AI Homework Machine," of @pjvogt.bsky.social's Search Engine podcast, talking about how writing matters, but we have to give students a chance to actually write. www.searchengine.show
Search Engine | Search Engine Podcast
Search Engine is the podcast that answers the questions that keep you up at night.
www.searchengine.show
February 14, 2025 at 11:21 PM
This is a great episode and gets to the heart of the real problem with AI in education, which is that for decades we’ve been teaching students to write like machines in order to meet the requirements of testing regimes.
Reposted by Andrew Duval
after living here for four years I can say that canadians are absolutely nice, but they aren't weak. it's just the american conception of strength is so tied to outrageous cruelty it's hard to imagine people can be both strong and kind
February 2, 2025 at 2:38 PM
after living here for four years I can say that canadians are absolutely nice, but they aren't weak. it's just the american conception of strength is so tied to outrageous cruelty it's hard to imagine people can be both strong and kind
Reposted by Andrew Duval
Devastating for scientists and their research, and everyone who benefits from that research.
I’m not sure if everyone outside academia is aware that a delay or “pause” in grant funding often means the researchers themselves are lost from the field, along with their expertise.
I’m not sure if everyone outside academia is aware that a delay or “pause” in grant funding often means the researchers themselves are lost from the field, along with their expertise.
NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research.
Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions
Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions
All NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities.
January 22, 2025 at 11:24 PM
Devastating for scientists and their research, and everyone who benefits from that research.
I’m not sure if everyone outside academia is aware that a delay or “pause” in grant funding often means the researchers themselves are lost from the field, along with their expertise.
I’m not sure if everyone outside academia is aware that a delay or “pause” in grant funding often means the researchers themselves are lost from the field, along with their expertise.
Feels like one of the most important things we can do right now. There’s no utopia, but we can make it easier to leave dystopias. Or at least try.
It’s time to reclaim social media! ✊🔥
Billionaires & monopolies shouldn’t control our digital lives.
Project @freeourfeeds.com is raising an initial $4m to build a public-interest alternative for social media, on the AT Protocol.
It's an ambitious, challenging project. Read more: freeourfeeds.com
Billionaires & monopolies shouldn’t control our digital lives.
Project @freeourfeeds.com is raising an initial $4m to build a public-interest alternative for social media, on the AT Protocol.
It's an ambitious, challenging project. Read more: freeourfeeds.com
Free Our Feeds
Let's take social media away from billionaire capture.
freeourfeeds.com
January 13, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Feels like one of the most important things we can do right now. There’s no utopia, but we can make it easier to leave dystopias. Or at least try.