Here’s my question… We believe that there is a need for a cohesive site for students so that they can see each other’s work and can comment. We’ve found that peer-to-peer commenting is incredibly powerful both for the commenter — he/she learns critical thinking and learns how to view his/her own writing in this way — and for the author who gets to have audience and authentic reaction.

When I poked around your class/student blogs it was hard for me to navigate and hard for me to see how the students interacted and how you, as a teacher, kept track of what the students were doing. Am I missing something? (ie., if you are a registered user is it easier ot see the connection between your class blog and the individual students’ blogs) or is this an issue? And, even, is it an important issue?

I am of two minds on this… Seems to make a lot of sense to get students to go out in the Web world and build blogs, and collages, and voicethreads, etc. There are great applications out there — new ones every day — that are a lot of fun and seem engaging.

But how does one pull together all of what a student is doing?

Our approach is to build sites. But we also want to be able to help teachers/schools who don’t want to do it that way and so far have been confused as to how other approaches can also take advantage of peer-to-peer collaboration and feedback.

Our sites: http://youngwritersproejct.org (student site for mostly after school writing) http://ywpvt.net (teacher site for teachers to have some resources AND a place where we conduct a master’s level course on digital learning online) and a host of other sites that are mostly closed (by choice of schools) to the outside world. My blog: http://ywpblog.ywpvt.net

Thanks

geoff gevalt
director, young writers project, inc.

I reckon these would be cool prompts for ‘news’