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Mixbook (or Mixbook for Educators) is a photo-based creation platform that offers hundreds of layouts and backgrounds to choose from along with customizable frames and text to make your book beautiful. Just pick a layout, drag-and-drop your photos into the photo slots, and edit to your heart's content.

Though the site's examples suggest using the books to gather wedding, travel, and baby albums, this program can absolutely used to create stories around historic photographs and artifacts, original art, to produce a class yearbook, to share an oral or personal history or journey, to tell the story of a field trip.  Mixbook for Educators now offers a secure collaborative environment for sharing their ebooks, as well as discounts on printed products, should you choose to print.  (A similar option is Scrapblog.)

Storybird, a collaborative storybook building space designed for ages 3-13, inspires young writers to create text around the work of professional artists and the collection of art is growing. Two (or more) people create a Storybird in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library. Storybird is also a simple publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.

Invite students using their University e-mail addresses; also invite the course administrator and another tutor (so that the Diigo work doesn’t get lost if you fall ill). Create a link from Diigo to the VLE (using the HTML code that Diigo provides) so that updates are posted to the VLE (I got the idea of using widgets found in Mason and Rennie’s on E-learning and Social Networking Handbook, 2008:83) – and possible show your Diigo ‘education pioneer’ badge too… See the screenshot from my Blackboard VLE below.

The idea is really quite simple: “The most simple thing that could possibly work” (Ward Cunningham) for personal/social learning environments in schools would rather be based on wikis than on an LMS like Moodle…One would have a wiki farm (one wiki for each class and year, and probably an over-all school wiki) with some simple routines and templates. (To do this right would be crucial.)…For the Wiki itself, it would be best to use an Open Source wiki platform (DokuWiki) running on own server, or on a community-driven server specialized in offering wiki-platforms for schools. Possible would be also Wikispaces (as white label service), Google Sites (as part of Google Apps Edu), or even Confluence (because it has all the features of a full & stable enterprise wiki system and is still not expensive).