There is a new phenomenon occurring in classrooms, workshops and meetings. It is called back channeling. This refers to participants in a event communicating and collaborating with technology to take notes, ask questions and reflect in real-time. A great tool to accomplish this is the website Today’s Meet. In order to get started you...
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Have you been to the Google Docs template gallery lately. If you have, you will notice that the available templates are continuing to grow. I recently searched for a template that could be  used to create a fictitious Facebook Profile. The first returned result ended up being exactly what I was looking for.  Take...
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The website Read Write Think has a fantastic tool available to help teach letter writing. They have provided an interactive letter writer. Here is a description taken directly from their website: “The Letter Generator tool is designed to help students learn to identify all the essential parts of a business or friendly letter, and...
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Writing in the 21st century has gone digital.  We are keyboarding instead of applying penmanship. We post to message boards, blogs, emails, twitter accounts, corporate intranets, Facebook and various other web-based sites and services. Writing has also become 3 dimensional. You don’t need the latest pair of 3D glasses to experience three dimensional writing....
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In my most recent newsletter I wrote an article about the benefits of students blogging. In that newsletter I mentioned a number of web-based tools that we have available in our district to support this initiative. One of the sites I discussed is Kid Blog. I have found Kid Blog to be a very...
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If you are looking to work on digital stories with your students or would like to engage your students in the writing process the following will be helpful. In our district we incorporate the writer’s workshop framework. We are also looking for innovative ways to implement writing across the curriculum. The RAFT STRATEGY is...
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Toondoo is a site that allows for the creation of comic strips. They offer  free accounts and private school account for a fee. The free accounts are very feature rich. The site does require the student to register for an account. This requires and email address to register. That limitation makes this a more...
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Story Jumper is a web 2.0 site that allows students and teachers to create their own page turning, online story book.  You can make adventure stories, fairy tales, treasure maps, photo books, calendars… whatever you can imagine! The software is easy to use and comes with a complete set of directions. As a teacher...
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Providing students an opportunity to write for an audience using a medium that they are familiar with, will increase not only the level of engagement of our students, but we also can expect a higher quality of work. The I offers many opportunities for students to publish their thoughts, opinions and comments. The read/write...
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