Tools

A few tools for creating web pages, blogs, e-books, e-posters, social media

Five steps to creating a classroom blog  by teacher Kathleen Morris has loads of useful tips for any classroom teacher wanting to get started. The companion piece is 10 Tips for introducing blogging in your classroom.

Creating Character Blogs is a lesson sequence (five or six 45 minute lessons) designed to enable  students to  learn the basic elements of blog creation, and then create a blog from the perspective of a fictional character. Students demonstrate understanding of the text by including images, quotations, links, and commentary on their blogs.

Edmodo is a secure social networking style space for the development of interactive teaching resources and communication. Edmodo is described as invitation-only social network, where teachers can work together in peer collaboration to develop their own web spaces within class or subject based Edmodos. Individual Edmodos can be developed for each class with students contributing content and comment.

Fakebook is a fun and very effective higher order thinking tool which allows teachers and students to create imaginary profile pages for analysing and synthesising information. Access to each page is controlled by the page creator and is password protected. Building a page includes adding friends and developing a series of status updates, taking into consideration dates, and the tenor of the status updates in portraying the relationships between participants. Carefully chosen images and related YouTube clips can be added. Teaching ideas can include charting the plot of a book, the development of a character and relationships with other characters, portraying historical events, debates and relationships between countries and people.

Wikispaces Classroom is a social writing platform which is free for education use. Teachers and  students can communicate and work on writing projects alone or in teams.

Wipasnapa is a very simple, easy to use beginner web design tool.