List of Web 2.0 tools

It is always a treat to find links to great web 2.0 tools that are first and foremost, easy to incorporate into class, and secondly, easy for me and my students to use.

I came across this first short list of Web 2.0 tools, broken out by grade, that are specified for the English and Language Arts realm (K-12) and thought I'd share. Of course you don't have to be in those content areas to use and benefit from them though!

I liked the bubbl tool for online brainstorming - easy, fun, and worked well with my kids!

The Acapela tool/site would be great for an English OR foreign language class...

For those of you who are looking for a more extensive list, here is a link to the top 100 Web 2.0 tools of 2011, according to edudemic.com

I KNOW there are some tools on there that you can use in your classroom. Give some a try!

Featured Blog: Film English

I stumbled across this blog tonight: Film English via Richard Byrne's blog. The Film English blog won a 2011 EduBlog award for Best Individual Blog, so I had to check it out. Let me tell you, it's incredible! The blog boasts a diverse amount of short films that all teach unique ideas: critical thinking, developing passions, creativity, social justice, human rights, writing, empathy, grammar, vocabulary, conservation, ecology...I could go on and on. Not only does each post contain multiple short video clips and images, each post contains step by step lesson plans for how to utilize this in the classroom. Posts are labeled by age appropriateness and difficulty. This teacher is committed to using film creatively to promote critical thinking and language acquisition. I can't wait to use a few of these in my own classes!

The Learning Network - New York Times

I have had good success with some of the lesson plans and ideas from the The Learning Network, a site dedicated to teachers and students which utilizes content from the New York Times. You can search for lesson plans by curriculum or topic. Or start simple and follow the Student Opinion pages (an online blog) and have your students comment/blog on the topic of the day if it seems like it might fit your class. Either way, it should get your students thinking and writing.

For an easy start... Here's a link to 150 questions you could try (surely there's one that might work for you).

Give it whirl if you like and see what you think! ~ :) Loree Cain

Tween/Teen Tribune

Tween/Teen Tribune is a fantastic news website specifically geared for junior high-high school students that presents high interest news stories arranged into categories so it's easy for students to find a story that interests them. Teachers and students can comment on stories, publish their own stories (and we all know that writing for an audience causes students to invest more!), and take quizzes over the news stories.

How it works: Teachers create classrooms and students add themselves to the classroom. Then when a student adds a comment to a story, the comment is sent to the teacher's approval queue for the teacher to approve or delete. It's a great way to immerse students in non-fiction at an accessible reading level.

I'd like to give a shout out to Pam Abbott from Progress Elementary who sent me an email regarding a sweet feature in Tween/Teen Tribune: parents can be added as readers to teachers' classrooms. They only have to be added once, and then they can read all comments posted by students in the class. What a great way for parents to stay informed and be a part of their child's education!

If you're interested, check out Tween Tribune--specifically, their Top 10 Lesson Plans page.