Group items tagged

R. Byrne suggests you try Silk, Dropr, and Weebly for creating digital portfolios. I've tried only Weebly, and it seems hard to remove items once you've put them into the template -- or to change templates. But these might be worth a trial. Links to these tools at the blog.

R. Byrne: "Over the course of the school year our students create some fantastic digital products. Building a digital portfolio is a great way for students to look back at everything they've done and organize it into a cohesive package. The following five tools are good services for creating digital portfolios." As always, Byrne gives some good brief examples of the kinds of lessons the tools can be used for. He includes Silk, Dropr, Google Sites, Weebly, and eduClipper. Some instructional videos included.

"# Create a free website & blog # Easy drag and drop interface # No technical skills required # Dozens of professional designs # Free domain hosting" This free Website maker could be used for media-rich student projects.

"Google's Drawing program is the perfect platform to practice orthography- the skill of writing characters and symbols to create words- in language classrooms with non-Roman alphabets, such as Arabic or Chinese. Students of these languages need lots of practice handwriting the new alphabet or pictographic symbols, which is difficult to do in a digital environment. In traditional word processing programs, typing pictographic languages, such as Chinese, requires the student to change the keyboard language and then phonetically type the syllables. Characters will pop out fully formed, which is efficient and useful, but bypasses the important orthographic practice! Google Drawing presents teachers with an opportunity to digital collect and monitor their students' orthography without having to scan in and email worksheets. The Scribble Tool in Google Drawing allows the user to create free form lines and by extension hand-drawn language characters. Couple Google Drawing with a pen mouse and Chinese language students are fully prepared to complete short answer or extended writing assignments online." You could also use Google Drawing for students from pictographic language to practice handwirting English.

"City College of San Francisco ESL students explore the Living Roof at the California Academy of Sciences with its 1.7 million native plants and exciting green technology which controls the building's temperature. Instructor: Cora Chen (visit Cora's ESL Page)" This is a nice example of how a day-trip can be combined into a media and reading-writing project for adult students.

I am still totally unconvinced that Twitter is good for schools. The gross confusion, chaos, and distraction on any Twitter feed is just anithetical to learning and to social interactions.