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They create a blended environment where teachers and students engage in both physical and online conversations so that learning is no longer confined to a single means of communication or even an arbitrary class perio

While Linda Yollis has a fantastic classroom blog, her 366 Project is incredible. She has clear instructions for how students from around the world can submit their photos to be shared. These photos make great writing prompts, conversation starters, and can spur on so many ideas in the classroom.

For the “Introduction to Skitch” 2-day lesson, I gave the students a choice board of activities. The students had fun creating treasure maps, Skitch selfies, classroom maps.

But true authenticity comes from the activities we use during class time, leaving an impact on the communicative skills of our students.

Use the language proficiency site developed by UTexas to gain access to native Spanish speakers talking about a variety of themes. These are conveniently divided into proficiency levels.

Screencasting is one of the most dynamic tools educators can use to transform their classroom in a dramatic fashion without investing a tremendous amount of time learning a new software piece or app.

Some of the most productive parts of the class were the weekly take-home assignments that asked the students to post comments on their social networking sites while using connected viewing technology

While the students learned a lot from the class assignments, they were initially anxious about letting an instructor into their social network. I felt it was necessary to preserve the anonymity of the students for the study so I wanted to keep their comments about the connected viewing private.

Unfortunately, the only way to ensure this anonymity was to create a “secret” Facebook group. “Secret” Facebook groups are one of three categories of groups that allow members of the social network to collaborate on a project. Though this setting allows all posts and members to remain confidential it also required me, as the creator of the “secret” Facebook group, to “friend” all of my students so that I could then add them to the group.

The truth is, every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. My argument here is pretty simple–there is no perfect platform for student blogging because everything that does exactly what a teacher wants sucks for students, and anything that is exactly what a student wants will probably get a teacher fired.

seven quick reasons why Tumblr may be perfect for the writing / blogging / posting / literacy piece in your room: Students can post by email. There’s an “ask” system. It’s social-by-design. Hashtags, sharing, reblogging, tweeting–it operates both as social media and a blogging system. It’s flexible. It can be visual or textual; video or gifs; audio or links; conversational or one-sided. It’s already on their phones. Well, most of them. Though they may delete it when they found out that you know. It’s dead simple to use. Reblogging is an interesting way to share thinking–and simple too. Maybe too simple to be considered cognitive heavy lifting, but that’s all in how you use it. Liking posts, using hashtags, posting new blogs–all simple to do from a tablet, phone, laptop, or desktop. It’s platform-agnostic. It works (almost) equally well across operating systems, much like Evernote. In fact, it can be thought of as the Evernote of blogging platforms.

This page has been set up to help you make connections with classes who are interesting in having Skype conversations with other classes.