Sunday, October 17, 2010

Creating My Hub Without Reinventing the Wheel

Before I left the classroom (the bricks and mortar one that is), I was feeling excited and competent in creating a writer's workshop environment in my classroom. Now I want to do that online but before I start I want to think through how I want that to look and what the best tool(s) are for doing that.

Basically (hah) I want to provide students with a site that contains all my resources for each step of the writing process, and the six traits of writing without an exhausting maze of links. As well I would like to provide each student with a page or place to publish their work within our online school walls. I teach grades 8-12 English in Moodle. The classes are generally small and so my thought is to have an outside source to provide the same resources to several grades of students.

Whether in a lesson in Moodle, in direct feedback to the student or a general email, I could link to these sources when needed. I would like to post current events as lists of possible writing topics, student writing samples, and links to web 2.0 tools.

So....keeping in mind that I currently present writing tasks in assignments within my Moodle courses, but would like to incorporate at least one block of true writer-centered writing, how would this all be best organized?
Website? Wikispace? Blog? A combination? Pageflakes?


3 comments:

  1. Here's what I do:

    I have a Moodle course set up for each of my classes. In that, I have "topics" set up for each quarter. Within each quarter, there are pages for each thing that we do. In your situation, you could set up a "topic" for writer's workshop.

    The other thing that I do, is have a blog set up for each student on http://kidblog.org. Kidblog is great. I set up each account and control what is published and commented on. The blog feature in Moodle isn't good. Kidblog is an awesome companion to what is posted in Moodle.

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  2. I think it could be a combination of the above. I am doing something similar for teaching Digital Storytelling. I am using Edu20.org because it does all of it in one simple to manage online LMS. Check it out!

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  3. Hi Jodie,
    I wonder if this would work:
    Set up a general course in Moodle to house your writing resources etc. You can enroll all of your English students in it and link to it from your other courses. This way students don't have to learn a new LMS.
    If you want the resources to be more openly available a website like Google Sites might be a good idea.
    In terms of sharing student work within a closed environment, you could have each student with their own blog (using kidblog, or edublogs, or blogger) or you could have a shared blog--where you control the main stuff, but students can add content. I've participated in a shared blog before, but it has been awhile, so the specifics are a little hazy.

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