Online Tools Take Time - But Reward too

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         Some things at school have changed so much since my return to teaching (a long while ago).  I remember when we first were able to get online that I told students that they must spend time using the Internet for their research.  Now I would say they should find a certain number of print sources.  The learning curve for teachers, in addition to all the other tasks, is huge.  

Most of this new learning has happened because of the Internet and the possibilities of reaching a much wider world more easily.  I don’t think I need to reiterate the many ways that teachers can support students in the new kinds of communication of whatever they want to say.   Sometimes when I search I find it overwhelming.  Is this the best one?  How does this work?  Does it require e-mails?  Is there enough choice in creating? 

Using Online Tools for All Kinds of Writing

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The Slice of Life posts are hosted every Tuesday by Stacey and Ruth at Two Writing Teachers

After reading the New York Times article concerning future changes in education, and discovering that February 1st is Digital Learning Day, a specific day set aside for adding to your digital learning expertise in order to apply it to education, I thought I’d recommend a few sites that I recently used in an online tools class.  Here are some things that happened:

I used Diigo, a bookmarking site (like Delicious if you use that) that you can use with a group or class by acquiring an educator account.   Each student has access to the personal ‘library’ set up online of the pages and sites I wanted them to explore, plus they could also recommend other tools they found and/or had already used to tell the rest of us about.  You can bookmark, sticky note and highlight specific portions of text.  You can add as many tags as you wish.  You can give assignments as to the approach of the link given. 

I found that the group loved it and looked forward to checking their account to see what had been recently added.  I imagine that students could send poems to share & to comment on within the site, or other kinds of text could be shared with a group, or a partner.  One project done:  I sent several articles of current interest to the students, and we had an online discussion of them with all of us sending comments.  One other idea is that students could send a review of a book read and others could agree or disagree with the review after reading the book.   

Here are other sites used that might be good for writing workshop: