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The Technology Liaisons Network provides opportunities for local writing project sites and leaders to consider the impact technology is having on the teaching and learning of writing and on the general work of sites.

While school leaders (rightly) focus on the importance of the Internet in students' lives and education, we ought to also seriously be considering what this report says about how we communicate with our parents and communities. And asking what exepectations we should have of all teachers of an online presence and use of digital communications.

Most of our parents fall smack into the Gen X category - that which has a disproportionately high percentage number of online users and is increasingly likely to look for information online.

Too often educators think of students as their "customers." Dangerous mistake. Children no more choose their  schools than they choose their physicians or shoe stores. Parents who wouldn't choose a bank that does not allow online account access won't choose a school that doesn't offer online gradebook access either.

I tried out Diigo educator and was REALLY impressed. This let me very quickly (and with no email addresses needed) set up accounts for 30 students. I then created a group for all 3 classes to use and added all the students to the group. In this case, since I only have one more day with the kids and am not sure if they'll be using Diigo after this, I just used the 30 accounts for multiple classes, but if this were for my actual students, I would have created an account for each student. Anyway, once all the students were added to the group, I just instructed them to make sure to share every bookmark for this project with the group. All of the students will then be able to view all of the bookmarks. Again, we couldn't install even the diigolet, but saving right from Diigo worked fine for our purposes. They used the same technique of tagging with last name, class hour, and other appropriate tags. I taught both of these methods in a 45 minute class period and the actual explanation of the bookmarking technique took only 7-10 min. of each class period. The kids (7th graders) picked up on it EXTREMELY fast.

for long term use and for individual projects I strongly recommend using Diigo educator, especially since I use Diigo so heavily in my personal and professional web research.

I highly recommend Diigo Educator to any teacher!

The NWP Technology Initiative (TI) provides opportunities for writing project sites to better understand the impact of new digital tools and information/communication technology on the teaching of writing.