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If you look at this editing tab, you can see that GrantG did a great job in his comments of documenting what he did. If we can get more students documenting their work as they edit, it makes the process of collaborative writing more powerful and faster as well as the ability to see what happened where. ""I wrote an introductory paragraph for our section. I asked my teacher and she said that because our topic has to do with current news, we can organize it in a way that includes introduction and conclusion paragraphs with a more list-like format in the middle. This is the reason I added a section for examples. Feel free to add relevant current news information as you find it!""

Collaborative Writing Rubrics - this is the rubric used for the video artifact and wikis on the Flat Classroom project. 

A wonderful blog from a Grade 4 teacher, my friend and Flat Classroom educator in Beijing, Shannon O'Dwyer. This style of writing really brings the classroom out to the world and invites interaction from a global audience!

I agree with some of these reasons - there are two mains issues - 1) lack of good quality e-books (in other words 'e-books' that are really PDF format with limited hyperlinking, interaction and social media 2) a lack of vision amongst teachers to encourage students to write their OWN text books.

Tom Whitby writes a provocative blog post about Connected Educator Month, August 2012. He states: "No, to be a good teacher, one does not need to be connected. However, the question is if you are a good teacher and unconnected, could you be a better teacher if you were connected? Shouldn't we strive to be the best that we can be? It's not only an Army thing. Being connected offers not only exposure to content and ideas but also the ability to create and collaborate on ideas. Being connected fosters transparency and debunks myths of education that have been harbored in the previous isolation of the education profession. This is the stuff of a true learner's dreams, and, as educators, are we not all learners?"

My friend and Flat Classroom teacher Anne Mirtschin @murcha from Victoria, Australia writes a sincere and enlightened review about ISTE 2013.

Julie Balen's blog - One of our new Flat Classroom Certified Teacher graduates from the 12-1 cohort. A thoughtful and committed educator who now flattens the classroom wherever she can!

This is an excellent post-reflective post from a fantastic student. You can see that she drafted in a word processor and pasted it in and then embedded the videos. Knowing how to use features of various programs in tandem is part of being fluent in software. Not just can they use one program or another but can they use them together to become more efficient and effective in the task at hand.

There is a fantastic feature on wikispaces that lets you drill down by student and see what work they've done. If you click on "recent changes" and then type in the userid and date, you can see the work. I now have students turn in their work on a google checklist - when they edit over a period of time, they type in their id and the dates and paste the link and I can grade with one click. This saves so much time and gives me a digital dashboard of all of the work they've done on a project.

Hackpad is an interesting tool. It claims to be a wiki but is more google doc-ish. They call them "smart" collaborative documents. You'll still need emails to invite people. It would be interesting to try out because you can link to other pads using the @ sign and it is also suited to iPHone and Android tools.

This was featured on "Free Technology for Teachers" Blog as a website that requires no registration. You just start blogging and you can make your post public or private.  Could be great for the under 13 group.