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?