SO What?

At some point during the morning of our second day I realized that the power of these tools comes from creating systems that use multiple tools effectively. AHA!

My first example is one that many people have mentioned:  student writing.  Creating a class community where students write in response to a given prompt would create a 'public' forum for those students' writing.  This would naturally play to their competitive nature to outdo each other and effort and engagement would increase, and writing would improve.  Follow that with a writing piece that demands students use a shared doc that allows the teacher to track progress, insert comments and questions, and perhaps invite other student collaborators to be invited in.  Suggest inserting a picture, graph, or other visual into the document.  Create a blog to share with parents and colleagues and publish some student work to the blog.  

My experience in the classroom is in mathematics.  Implementing the CCSS will mean that students are writing more to explain their reasoning, justify their answers, and create arguments.  A very similar process could be used in a math classroom.  The prompts might start off simply:  What helps you learn math?  What gets in your way?  With this start, students would be invited in to the community of learners with a question that has no wrong answer.  The forms tool would allow the teacher to collect exit questions and formative data from all class members.  A quick video could set up a problem as in the "Three Act" type problems that Dan Meyer has promoted.

Not to be overlooked is the power of collaboration that these tools elicit.  Remember when someone mentioned the chart paper used to capture thoughts of a group?  It brought me back to a time when I lost an important chart.  We spent days looking for it--asking everyone if they had it--looking at rolled up chart papers that lurked in every corner.  Months later I found it in a corner of my house.  (I tried to blame my hubby. . . . maybe he took it out of my car and put somewhere?)  I thought that using an iPad to take pictures of the completed chart was a huge advancement.  Cannot wait to use a shared document!

Another AHA!

Learning to Blog

This seems like a pretty simple tool, however, I need to mess around with it to more fully understand what I can do with this.

I can change ink color and font.  SEE?? I can use italics and bold and text size.  

Can I insert a picture?  

Yes, I can!

I would like to change the background color-----