Websites
EduBlogs – Free basic use, limited cost for ‘campus’ use
EduBlogs is a great resource for educators that want to create a blog quickly and easily. At the elementary level, it may be a little advanced for students to write their own blogs (but certainly it’s possible!) but it’s very easy for students to comment on teacher blog entries. The applications for reflection, commentary, and dialogue are nearly endless – any conversation that one could have in person can be had on EduBlogs… except you get the benefit of asynchronous and stored communication. Consider using it for in-character debates, subjective discussion prompts, and allowing students to write how a story connects to their personal lives.
Glogster – Free!
This online tool allows students to create interactive, multimedia-based posters/newsletters/mashups. The Edu version is a protected area specifically designed for teachers and their students. Possible reading and writing uses include designing advertisements/book reviews, highlighting important events from a character’s life, and creating a comic book to support sequencing skills.
Intel Visual Ranking Tool – Free!
This tool is ideal for helping students rank or prioritize concepts, attributes, items, characters, and more. In groups, students not only rank elements but justify their rankings. By requiring justifications, students are forced to reflect upon and critically evaluate their own opinions. Group dynamics that support understanding different points of view can be elicited both in the ranking/justification process as well as when comparing one group’s rank list to another. Possible reading uses include ranking the importance of characters, the relative impact on characters of plot events, and the implied messages of the reading material.
Intel Showing Evidence Tool – Free!
An absolute favorite among the Digital Language Arts team, the Showing Evidence Tool is the quintessential way for teaching ever-elusive “critical thinking” skills. In a simple, structured interface, students gather evidence for and against a claim, categorize and annotate the evidence, weigh the evidence, and then reach a conclusion based on their efforts. Workable for upper-elementary all the way through post-secondary education, this tool trains the mind, through practice, to arrive at conclusions based on reason, critical evaluation, and analysis of pros and cons rather than gut instinct or superficial analysis of issues. Possible reading uses include judging a character’s choices, speculating on a character’s internal motivations, and debating the theme of a novel.
Rubistar – Free!
Rubistar is an online tool to help educators quickly and easily create rubrics. You can start with pre-made rubrics based on various subjects, topics, or products, and then customize them to further meet your individual needs. Providing rubrics to students for their culminating projects is essential to keeping them focused on the skills and ideas that you need them to acquire.
ThinkQuest – Free!
This amazing website is a great way to introduce elementary students to the power of web 2.0 tools in a protected, controlled environment. ThinkQuest offers teachers and students the capabilities to easily create their own webpages, blogs, message boards, and cooperative projects. It also allows teamwork between schools from across the world, at the school administrator’s discretion, to support truly global perspectives. ThinkQuest has the highest possible recommendation from the Digital Language Arts team!
VoiceThread – Free for educator use, limited cost for school use
VoiceThread is a very powerful online tool for adding voice narration to images. Users upload one or more images and then let one or more people record their voices. Recordings can be “attached” to different areas of the image. Results can be shared through the web, and can even be commented on by others. Possible uses in reading are retelling, summarizing, and building new, scripted stories from scratch.
James Maxlow | 
January 13, 2009 8:00 pm
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Hello DLA team! I am a fan and have a class ready to start using Thinkquest (just applied today). Question: Can Thinkquest serve as a “showcase” for the various capstone projects that you have noted in your wiki (i.e can they be “embedded”)? If so, how? If not, is there a forum/medium (like a wiki) that can be used to showcase?
Keep up the good work!
Hello,
We’re very glad to hear that you’re ready to dive into ThinkQuest.
In setting up your school’s ThinkQuest area, you have the choice to make it viewable by any ThinkQuest member in the world, or just to those in your school. If you want their products showcased, you can upload them and let other ThinkQuest members see them. But that means that only ThinkQuest members could see them.
If you want the general public to see them, you will need to find an alternate site. Perhaps you could create an EduBlog and post content there, or use 21Classes, or PBWiki, or WikiSpaces, or TeacherTube. Weebly or Wetpaint might also work for you. Each service has various control mechanisms and file size limits, so you would need to explore to find the best match for your class.
Best of luck!
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