Skip to main content

Home/ Clif's Notes on EdTech/ Group items tagged collaborative-writing

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Dean Mantz

100 Web Tools to Enhance Collaboration (Part 2) by Ozge Karaoglu - 7 views

  • Voxopop is a message board system which lets you create talk groups that you can talk, discuss and collaborate using your own voice.
  • EtherPad is a web based word processor that lets you work with others at the same time
  • Survs lets you create your online surveys collaborating with others in multi user accounts
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Mindmeister is an online collaborative mind mapping tool that you can brainstorm with others real-time.
  • Voicethread.
  • Tgether allows you to communicate in small groups by emails.
  • StoryBirds are short and simple stories that connect you with others.
  • WebCanvas is a collaborative painting project.
  • AwesomeHighlighter
  • Protagonize is a community that writes collaborative, interactive fiction.
  • Mixbook is a site that lets you create picture books with others.
  • Thinkature places an instant message inside a visual workspace with voice chat.
  • TextFlow is a way to review document versions instantly to produce a final draft
  • LucidChart is another way to collaborate on a document simultaneously.
  • built-in group chat that makes it easier for you to collaborate.
  • Wikispaces is the best way to create collaborative web pages that you can edit and share together
  • Senduit lets you upload your files and share them with private links with your team.
  • Stintio, you can create your own chat in seconds
  • invite
  • don't download or install
  • Yuuguu is an instant screen sharing and video conferencing
  • Voxli allows you to hold voice conferences online. You can have a voice chat up to 200 people.
  • Wridea is an online idea management service and a collection of brainstorming tools
  • store, manage,organize and share
  •  
    Part 2 of 100 Web Tools to enhance collaboration
Dean Mantz

100 Web Tools to Enhance Collaboration (Part 1) by Ozge Karaoglu - 18 views

  • DabbleBoard is a whiteboard that enables you to visualize, explore and collaborate.
  • CoSketch is another whiteboard that you can collaborate to visualize your ideas and share them as images.
  • Stixy lets you create online bulletin board to collaborate with family, friends, colleagues.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Grou.ps lets you create your own social network.
  • create your forum, mailing list, share documents,files and your agenda to organize events, have your own YouTube, share links, bookmarks, photos
  • ImaginationCubed is a multi user drawing tool.
  •  GroupTweet. It lets you create your Twitter account into a group communication tool where everyone in the group uses direct messages
  • Wallwisher is an online notice board maker
  • Nik Peachey's Wallwisher as a great example.
  • PageFlakes is a social personalized homepage
  • WriteBoard is a-web based text documents
  • Wiggio is an online toolkit
  • emails, text messages,voice mails.
  • eep shared calendar,
  • WeToku is an interview tool that automatically records
  • share your notes
  •  Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer
  • PalBee is a free online service that allows you to set up online video meetings
  • Phuser is a tool for groups to discuss or work together and privately
  • WikiDot is wiki builder to share content, documents and collaborate with your students, colleagues, friends
  • Creately lets you create professional looking online diagrams with your colleagues
  • DoingText is a web based text editor for collaborative writing.
  •  SpringNote is an online notebook for collaboration.
  • MeBeam is a place where you can create your chat room
  •  
    Part 1 of 100 Web Tools to enhance Collaboration
drew polly

Charlie's Chirps - 0 views

  •  
    Travel journal of school's toy mascot. Incorporates teacher and student writing and journaling. Maintained by Joan Schlegelmilch.
  •  
    Flat Stanley collaborative writing project but on a blog.
drew polly

The 1001 Flat World Tales - 0 views

  •  
    Selected stories from the never-ending, worldwide 1001 Flat World Tales wiki writing workshop.
Clif Mims

iCue - 0 views

  •  
    A fun, innovative learning environment built around videos from the NBC News Archives. Connections to classes in history, politics, government, writing, literacty, media, and more.
Clif Mims

Twiducate.com - Social Networking For Schools - 11 views

  •  
    Teachers can create an online community for their students. "Share inspiration, ideas, reading, thoughts. Post discussions, deadlines, homework. Instrantly create surveys for students. Keep parents informed of daily projects." "Not only will twiducate.com give your students the web 2.0 skills they need, but also expand their reading, writing, thoughts and ideas beyond the classroom setting."
Mark Cruthers

WiZiQ free Virtual Classroom - 58 views

video

Favorite Resources

started by Mark Cruthers on 11 May 08 no follow-up yet
Dean Mantz

Ideas to Inspire - 0 views

  • 'Ideas to Inspire' is a collection of collaborative presentations, which offer a large number of ideas for engaging lesson activities. They are the result of the collaboration of teachers from all around the world
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. It is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
  • Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
  • Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
  • As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
  • Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
  • The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
  • I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
  • When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
Ben Rimes

The Test Generation - 11 views

  • "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      How many decades have teacher's experienced this firsthand as students try to cheat, weasel, and otherwise fabricate their way to the reward, whether it's a gold star, a piece of candy, or some extra credit.
  • In 2005, for example, Alabama reported that 83 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in reading, even though the NAEP found that only 22 percent of these children were proficient readers. The harsh punishments associated with NCLB had encouraged Alabama and most other states to dumb down their tests and then teach directly to them.
  • The letter is a thinly veiled attack on teachers' unions and the job security for which they fight. Mike Stahl, former executive director of the Pikes Peak Education Association, says union membership in Harrison has decreased by half under Miles' leadership, and that teacher turnover, at about 25 percent from year to year, "is the highest in the state among like-sized or larger districts." According to Stahl, Miles "is very anti-union and very prone to retaliation for speaking in opposition to district or superintendent plans. ... There was no collaboration with staff or union in the development of this plan. As a result, district teacher morale is extremely low."
    • Ben Rimes
       
      This is where a lot of the proponents of education and teacher evaluation reform fall. In the area that no longer concerns itself with building effective cooperation, teamwork, and a positive work atmosphere, a shame really.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Since Miles became superintendent, Harrison's scores on state exams in math, reading, and writing have steadily increased. In reading, for example, 54 percent of Harrison students were proficient in 2005, compared to 61 percent in 2010. Critics who chalk those gains up to "drill and kill" teaching might find at least one thing to love about Harrison District 2: Its test score-based teacher-evaluation system is matched by intense professional-development efforts of the sort promoted by education experts from across the political spectrum.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      The silver lining of this system.
  • But "really systemic, momentous things are happening right now, and I am at the ideological epicenter of that change," he added. "If nothing else, it's really interesting
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Don't our schools deserve reform and/or experimentation that is better than just "really interesting?"
  • Rival groups of education researchers interpret the reliability of value-added differently but even the technique's defenders have urged caution, as have the Educational Testing Service and the Department of Education's own Institute for Education Sciences. Experts raise a number of powerful objections: that value-added measurements are often based on poorly designed, unsophisticated standardized tests; that the ratings are particularly volatile (a teacher who scores very well or very poorly using value-added has only a one-third chance of getting a similar score the following year, and it takes about 10 years of data to reduce the value-added error rate to 12 percent for any individual teacher); and that the technique gives the impression that the teacher is the only factor in student achievement, ignoring parental involvement, after-school tutoring, and other "inputs" that research shows account for up to 80 percent of a student's achievement outcomes
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Although "value-added" seems great on the surface, having to wait around for 10 years to get a 12 percent error rate and then deal with all of the uncontrolable factors, makes student performance assessments seem like a joke almost.
  • A consensus is emerging on what those best practices are, and they have little to do with test-driven instruction. Research by Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University teaching expert and former Obama adviser, has found that in Finland, South Korea, and other high-performing nations, teachers spend just 50 percent of their workday in the classroom with students, compared to about 80 percent for American teachers. During the rest of their day, Finnish and South Korean teachers work with other adults to plan lessons, observe one another's classrooms, and evaluate student work. This balance is especially important for beginning teachers; powerful evidence suggests that the single most helpful teacher-training exercise is to spend time inside a master teacher's classroom and to get feedback from that master teacher on one's own practice.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Reflective practitioning through blogging as a systemic model for teacher PD would be one way to encourage growth in this area.
  • The teachers are grouped to maximize the sharing of best practices; one team includes a second-year teacher struggling with classroom management, a veteran teacher who is excellent at discipline but behind the curve on technology, and a third teacher who is an innovator on using technology in the classroom.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Interesting group composition, and would be easy to put together in any school with proper surveys and cooperation among teaching "families".
  • When I visited MSLA in November, the halls were bright and orderly, the students warm and polite, and the teachers enthusiastic -- in other words, MSLA has many of the characteristics of high-performing schools around the world. What sets MSLA apart is its commitment to teaching as a shared endeavor to raise student achievement -- not a competition. During the 2009-2010 school year, all of the school's teachers together pursued the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' Take One! program, which focuses on using curriculum standards to improve teaching and evaluate student outcomes. This year, the staff-wide initiative is to include literacy skills-building in each and every lesson, whether the subject area is science, art, or social studies.
    • Ben Rimes
       
      This is what schools should be doing. Foster community, cooperation, and collaboration among the teachers, not isolating them in content area groups, and separating them based on department. Inter-disciplinary teaching teams is a first start, but having everyone in a district adopt the same goal, and work together would be huge.
  • As Nazareno walked me through MSLA's hallways, introducing me to kids and teachers, she reflected on how her profession is changing. "I'm not afraid of being held accountable. I haven't dedicated a career to have kids unable to read or do science," she said. "But people need to understand that teaching and learning are very complex processes, and any time you try to measure anything that's highly complex, you can miss the nuances." Nazareno paused outside a classroom door and lowered her voice. "We had a girl in the second grade whose mother died. At the school next door, a girl was brutally murdered. That's all they've been talking about there for two weeks; they lost a lot of instruction time." She raised her eyebrows. "How do you factor that into value-added?"
    • Ben Rimes
       
      Education ultimately is about navigating the real world, and attempting to make meaning from our daily individual experiences, or building community around shared experiences.
Dean Mantz

Create your newspaper | NewsCred - Create and Discover Newspapers About the Things You ... - 1 views

  •  
    Create your own newspaper by writing editorials or collecting news from other sources.
Paul McKenzie

The Committed Sardine - blog - 4 views

  •  
    A great post by Ian Jukes. The writing is certainly on the wall for the "bring in the expert and sit up straight" style of professional development. I've been wondering for years why schools don't pool their collective expertise to create a culture of learning in their schools. Some of the "experts" that are brought in don't even have the practical or even theoretical expertise of residing staff members. This year a visiting professional told me, "When it comes to schools, there are never any prophets in your own backyard." The zeitgeist is certainly suggesting we need a change.
Dean Mantz

Storychasers | empowering responsible digital citizenship - 0 views

  •  
    Are you interested in learning about current news or historical events...participate in the Story Chasers blog/wiki. Students and teachers can research such items in their local communities and share them in a collabortive way via connections on this site.
Clif Mims

Twitter in Education - 5 views

  •  
    www.killdo.de.gg Most quality online stores. Know whether you are a trusted online retailer in the world. Whatever we can buy very good quality. and do not hesitate. Everything is very high quality. Including clothes, accessories, bags, cups. Highly recommended. This is one of the trusted online store in the world. View now www.retrostyler.com
Roland O'Daniel

TitanPad - 8 views

  •  
    TitanPad lets people work on one document simultaneously We are rescuing EtherPad for your use.
1 - 17 of 17
Showing 20 items per page