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One of the most basic and powerful ways to increase student motivation to write and communicate is to change student perceptions of audience. Some students are motivated to write to please their teacher and earn a high grade, but that is not the case for everyone. Instead of asking students to write exclusively for an audience of one (the teacher) using technology from the mid 1500s (a pencil,) teachers can now challenge students to publish for a global listening audience via a classroom podcast. This article provides an overview of the benefits of classroom podcasting and showcases several exemplary classroom podcasts teachers and students can use as models when creating their own.

The most interesting feature to me, however, is the way the tool can alert students of a website’s credibility. EasyBib measures credibility through a system of checks based on content, author, links, citations, currency (when it was published), who published it, etc. That information, compounded with data from the current 38 million students using the site right now, makes for fairly accurate recommendations, although some sites (like TNW) aren’t used enough for research to have a rating yet.

In this article, I will demonstrate how you can increase the levels of complexity both technically and linguistically in web-based storytelling by using tools that ask more of your students at each stage.

He has created awesome example forms for different topics. He has also , thankfully , made all these forms availabe for us to download and use with our students