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There are a variety of Educational Technology tools which help students and teachers with writing. This list is by no means exhaustive but will provide a start point for teachers who wish to use technology to help their students with writing.

Moodle
Moodle is built around social constructivist principles and as such there are a variety of tools which encourage students to engage in writing.
Forums are very useful and encourage students to interact. You can choose from a variety of forums and the standard and social forums are probably most useful in this context.
Moodle has a blog module which will allow students to contribute to a class blog or to create their own.
The Assignment module allows students to submit typed work online and the workshop module takes this further in that students can peer assess other work. If you use this in conjunction with “ground rules” you establish for written work it can allow both the writer and reader to be mindful of literacy basics.
Finally the wiki module is one of my own favorites.  Use it to allow peer review and to encourage open sharing of student work.

Edu-Applications

I am not going to write about word processors but they have to take first place in this section.
My favorite blogging tool for school use is http://kidblog.org/home/ – it is a free platform, allows you to monitor and evaluate posts before publicly publishing work and is safer than other more open systems. It is easy to use and to set up.
Scolastic Story Starter – http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/story-starters/ this website provides great writing prompts.
Comic Life – this application allows your students to easily create graphic novels easily. It is also available for ipad.
Storyjumper ; an online tool that allows you to publish your own book find it at http://www.storyjumper.com
Wordle – a nice way to display a story. Most frequently used words will stand out larger than others.

Ipad Applications

Comic Life has an ipad application
There is a wordpress app for ipad
There are a variety of word processors/note applications
The ability to use ibooks author, ebook creator or ebook magic to create content for ibooks is fantastic – getting students to create their own work can be very productive and rewarding.
Use mindmap applications such as ithoughts, popplet or mindjet to get students to plot their work.

Website to check out

http://www.literacytools.ie which this is produced by NALA for adults there are some useful resources that may help second level students also.

Wishing all readers a happy 2013! In this months post my focus is on some practical tools to help with reading. Thank you for all the positive comments about this series. I am glad that colleagues are finding it useful. Please feel free to share it with others – especially with schools who are taking literacy as their focus this year.

Moodle
Use a moodle glossary to create reading lists – create various lists of age appropriate reading. Consider linking to online books also.
Use the database module to develop user generated reading lists. As part of the set up encourage students to write a review, suggest age appropriate levels etc.
As a shared endeavour (between colleagues or even with students) you could make quizzes around “free choice” books in your school library.

Educational Apps
There are a variety of apps that help students with reading. Popular with learning support departments are text to speech applications. These generally fall into the area of “accessibility applications” however that they can also help reluctant or struggling readers. One is read and write gold – you can find more information at http://www.texthelp.com/ . Texthelp also offer a free solution which is the text help toolbar and the Chrome browser with documents created in Google drive.  Kurzweil also offer a similar product http://www.kurzweiledu.com/k12.html Microsoft have thier microsoft reader – http://www.microsoft.com/reader/developers/downloads/tts.aspx and you can enable text to sppech through the settings on an ipad.
Not quite a computer based idea but worth sharing nonetheless – turn on the subtitles to accompany the TV! Read and watch……..

Ipad/Iphone app
http://tinyurl.com/blre3nx – is the reading trainer app
http://tinyurl.com/ctvrwma – the stanza app giving access to a large variety of free books
http://tinyurl.com/d9x5uoz – I have blogged about the kindle app before but I find it has changed my own reading. I really like the way of being able to download books as and when I please. The facility to log in and see what other people have highlighted/notes they have written is especially useful.
http://tinyurl.com/btxmr9b is a link to puppet pals – this is a great app which allows you to do readers theatre. You can find scripts to aid with this at http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm
http://tinyurl.com/dy8ux9w is a link to the recommend links to reading apps by the good folks at apple. Many are more suitable for younger readers but there may be some useful resources as starter activities.

Website to check out
http://www.reading.org this link is a bit predictable but as it has useful lesson plans and links to resources as well as links to other publications, I think it is worth checking out!

Continuing the focus on literacy this month but paying special attention to oral literacy. Oral literacy is the keystone of all literacy and something which we often do unintentionally in the mainstream (non languages) classroom. As a teacher of students working second languages in a “past life” I was always trying to encourage my students to reach beyond their comfort zone and speak in English! I am happy to share some of the tools and ideas I have worked with to enable students to speak more confidently.

Moodle

The Nanogong module is absolutely wonderful. You can read more about it at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=207375 . You can encourage students to leave oral answers to questions in the assignment module, or to speak their contributions in discussion forums. We once ran the early sessions of a poetry recitation competition using that format.

The podcast module is one of my favorite ways to use Moodle.  I have not had a chance to work with it in Moodle 2 yet but there is a rich discussion to be found at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=7230 on the new module. One of my favorite ideas was to organise students into teams to do revision notes, to record the notes and to put them into the podcast module . Students love to listen to notes “on the run!”. I also used it to run early sessions of “MY School has talent” competitions. Using it with the choice module allowed students to voice also!

Finally if you want a very simple way of using moodle to monitor/assess students oral work, use a tool such as audacity to record an MP3 and ask students to upload it using the assignment module. Very easy to do and you can then save and share the best ones.

Edu Apps

I have long been a fan of audacity – simple to use and easy to convert to MP3 (using the encoder).  Find it at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ . I have used it for students to record notes (see the podcasting idea above) and I have got students to create moving stories where one starts a story, they swap seats and the next adds the next line etc., the opportunities are endless but the tech is easy!

When dealing with oral literacy it would be remiss to forget about the presentation.  Thankfully we are moving away from the “death by presentation ” that many considered to be good use of tech in the classroom! However, I still think it is worth teaching students how to make decent presentations. The tools available which include PowerPoint, keynote, prezi and Google presentations are very intuitive to use. Couple it with an approach such as the atomic method of making a presentation http://goo.gl/UbkQE and you have some great oral literacy in action!

Another App worth looking at is voice thread. It involves more work in setup and does require time to learn it (both from student and teacher perspectives) but the rich sharing opportunities it affords make it worth the learning curve.  Find out more at http://voicethread.com/about/features/

Finally, don’t forget that you can record audio in Microsoft PowerPoint . Check out http://goo.gl/0O77C for more information.

Ipad/Iphone Apps

Looking through my own devices I find that there are a few I return to.

The Voice Memo is the easiest and simplest to use – if you have school email students can record their piece and email it to you.

Voicethread has an app which works very well and makes creating voice threads that bit more convenient for students.

I invested some time a while back looking at Audioboo and while I liked it I found the public nature of the boos might be a bit off-putting for shier students. You can come round this by sending private boos http://forum.audioboo.fm/kb/publishing-boos/faq-editing-and-privacy

Website of the month

http://goo.gl/iRjDo – if you would like to read what Vicky Saumell  rated as the top tools to record your students’ voice!

As promised I continue to look at ICT tools and how they can be used to support Literacy……

Moodle

Another variation of the glossary theme this month. Set up spelling lists of keywords as a moodle glossary – a good idea would be to include antonyms and synonyms in the description section (just make sure these are clear!). Turn auto linking on and that way every time one of the keywords used students can click on the “highlight” (created because of auto links). A variation of this could be to  set an online assignment using either the forum or blog modules and ask students to use these words in their assignments (thus reinforcing the use of terms).

Edu App

Comic Life is an excellent tool to help with student literacy. I have found that boys really engage with this tool. Use it in any language based lesson to ask students to illustrate a topic (in words and images). I have used this for the people in history section of the Junior Cert course. Each student takes a different person and using Comic Life they create a comic book. Get them to save them and upload them to moodle through the database feature in moodle. Ensure that they can’t see others contribution unless they contribute one themselves – a rich resource, superb peer teaching and lots of fun!

Ipad app

I have used two apps for creating comics – Comic Book and the app version of Comic Life and would recommend both. Easy learning curve and can be used as the desktop versions.

Website of the month

http://www.icepe.ie/course is a link to the courses section of the ICEP website. I have done a few of their course and they are ideal for the busy teacher as you take them in your own time and the resources are excellent – I point out this one as there is a new course on Literacy which I will be taking myself this term!

This year I am going to make using ICT to develop literacy my focus. All schools in Ireland are focusing on Literacy or Numeracy this year and as my school has chosen literacy; this blog is an endeavour to support my colleagues in this area.  As usual I will deal with one idea  for using Moodle, one for an App, an Educational App and a website.

Moodle
Deis schools will already be familiar with the idea of getting students to keep word banks. Identifying key vocabulary and explicitly teaching it, and encouraging students to keep a dictionary of this vocab and displaying the vocab in the classroom certainly is of benefit when teaching a topic. One strategy I find very useful is to “pre-teach” topics using the Moodle glossasry. The methodology is simple,  I give each student  a word and as homework I ask them to add it and the definition of the word to a glossary of terms. I prefer to set my glossary up so that terms are not released until I have approved them (it gives me the chance to check and correct them if necessary). This glossary will then form the “dictionary” for the topic I am teaching  - all students have access to it and it can be used for revision later. To help to reinforce the keyterms you can use the game module to turn the glossary into the hangman or crossword games.

Iphone/Ipad App

A really nice idea for vocab is to get students to find images (teach them about royalty free images or get them to use their cameras to take them) and then to use the PicCollage app to create a cool collage of the images! http://pic-collage.com/ To enhance this further you could use GIMP (see below)  or the Photo Captions app (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photo-captions-free-frames/id327921474?mt=8t  ) to caption the images.

Educational App

GIMP is a free image manipulation programme – use it to caption images.

Website of the month

If you have not found the JCSP website with its excellent resources on literacy http://www.jcspliteracy.ie/lit_initiatives.php then it is worth checking out. If you have not found this document on the site then be sure to take a look at it goo.gl/1FlXq

Moodle Item of the Week

Plenty to blog about this month! Firstly a big congratulations to those who brought the moodle moot to us! A fantastic opportunity to meet other moodlers for us in Ireland. I was very excited to meet Mary Cooch having corresponded with her over 2 continents in the last 10 years!  I’d also like to bring your attention to avery exciting series brought by Mark Glynn through http://www.linireland.com/events/moodle-webinars.html- a great range of tutorials/ideas on how to use moodle in your classroom. I helped with one of them and it got me thinking about using the comment feature in both the glossary and database modules as an AFL (assessment for Learning)tool. One idea I had was to use the 2 stars and a wish as a scaffold for student to guide them in making a comment. The basics of this is that they come up with 2 good things and 1 improvement to make on the entry they are commenting on.

Edu App of the week

This one came through the CESI list and it is an easy way to add sound toyour presentations. http://www.helloslide.com/faqis where you can find it and essentially you upload pdfs – add text and the software speaks it for you!

I Phone App of the week

http://appsineducation.blogspot.com/p/re-ipad-apps.htmlis a link to a variety of apps for RE. Using the links at the top of this site you can also explore other apps.

Website of the Week

http://ed.ted.com/

Is a link to the new Ted Education site – I have blogged about Ted before but this site (which is customised for education) is well worth checking out!

Moodle

I have blogged before about quizzes in Moodle but discourse around assessment techniques and Moodle would not be complete without a visit to this module. If you are using Moodle 2 you will be experiencing great benefits of the new module. Consider training students to flag questions they would like you to address in class. Also look at how you can tie a quiz at the end of a set of lessons or other resources so that they become a conditional activity based on completion of these earlier tasks. My best tip around using Moodle quizzes is to start off with a small question base and to build it up over time – remember you can add questions the next time you do the topic also. I always tend to stick with “self-marking” quizzes as I find they are hugely time saving. I also allow students to retake quizzes as the learning from a retake can often be very beneficial – assessment as learning! Let’s not fool ourselves though this is very low on Blooms taxonomy, but as the knowledge component can be very important for students in exams, this is a very useful tool.  Finally remember you can request that the Moodle administrator sets up a role whereby students can add questions to quizzes – great for adding to your quiz bank and great learning for your students.

I-pad/i-phone/i-touch App

The new ibook author tool (available on your regular mac!) is fabulous – use it to create ibooks in a jiffy!! I blogged previously about creating an e-pub but this is so much easier. Check out more information on this at http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/ – use the books with your students on their devices……

Educational Application

I have recently installed and trained a few teachers on how to use Dragon dictate and they are “loving it”! The ability to just speak notes into word and for the programme to do all the hard work is very appealing for teachers who are not able to touch type.  Check it out! Teachers remember to use http://www.software4students.ie/Dragon_Naturally_Speaking-list.aspx to avail of an educational discount.

Website of the month

I recently stumbled on this really informative site http://www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,2987,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html – I would highly recommend that teachers take a look as it frames lots of the recent pisa results in bite size chunks.

PLN corner

Check out http://elearningisland.ie/ and follow Donal on twitter at @domaho

This year I am only posting once per month. However, if you have not visited previously you will find a wealth of resources in my previous posts.

Moodle item of the month

I will focus on Assessment for the next few months. Last month I looked at HotPotatoes and suggested ways of using this as both a formative and summative assessment tool. This month I wish to explore the idea of using the workshop module in Moodle. A colleague in the Dublin Moodle Users Group showed us this module a few weeks ago and it is a module that I had tried to work with in the past. It was not working for me but hats off to Ennovation (our Moodle partner) they were able to tell me that the assignment uploading feature was not enable on student roles (one to watch for if this module is not “behaving”). If you are working in my school however, the module is now working and availalbe for use. It is a tricky module to learn and as usual there are a wealth of resources on YouTube to help you. Essentially, however, you upload a rubric. Student assess their own and each others work (I like to give them 2 to assess). It is a great way to get students to connect in with a mark scheme and to focus them on what is called for in summative assessments. I have also found that it raises standards as students work harder (knowing their peers will see it) and they also learn from the experience of seeing each others work.

EduApp of the month

A great application which was recommended by Susan our Home Ec/Geography/SEN teacher is Tarsia. This is a free download and is intuitive to use. I enjoyed using it myself and creating a series of questions which students match to answers to form a shape. It is ideal for formative assessment, a refresher activity in the starter of a lesson or even as a group work exercise in the lesson or the plenary. Check it out!!

Website of the month

Have you found TED yet? If you have not found this great site them you need to visit it now www.ted.com – for ideas worth spreading.

I-pad/I-phone item of the month

I have not used this app myself (as I tend to do much of this work in Moodle) however some of my colleagues are raving about TeacherPal – it allows you to track attendance, behaviour and grades. Worth a try as it is free!

PLN corner

A great person to follow on twitter is missnoor28 – lots of great websites and tips on how to use technology in education.

Moodle item of the month

I did lots of great training on Moodle this week with new staff in my school. We were looking at using Moodle based tools for quizzes. We looked at Hotpotatoes (both the cloze test and multiple choice quiz). I’m sure you know this, but it is worth reminding ourselves that students can easily create a hotpotoato quiz. This is a great revision tool for students – but teachers can then upload the best ones to become a class wide revision tool for the school.

Application of the month

We have been doing a lot of work around finding good solutions for recording oral work. Ideas including using
* voicethread
* ipod touch/iphone and the memo recorder
* using audacity and uploading the sound file to moodle for marking
While they are all good to use I am looking forward to exploring the third option as it seems like a very simple way of saving sound  files for reflection and marking.

App of the month

I have recently used my kindle app extensively – not only can I download books to my ipad and pick them up where I leave off on the my iphone – I have also found that with academic books I can highlight key sentences and words and then log into my amazon/kindle account and get a page of all my highlights. This is great when preparing literature reviews. I can also see the most popular highlights by other people……also useful for the busy researcher/teacher.

Website of the week

Check out http://edublogawards.com/ – here you will find all the winners of 2011 and no doubt some other interesting sites. No Irish winners this year but I have a feeling that our excellent SEN, Art and Maths blog are likely future contents. Find the links to these at www.belvederecollege.ie

Moodle item of the week
Continuing my exploration of the Administration panel in Moodle 1.9x, I turn today to the “files” area. If you are uploading several files at once (be they in a compressed folder or individual files) it is worth turning to the files area of the administration panel rather than uploading through the “link to file or folder” in the add resources section of each block. The files area allows you to set up folders (which is well worth doing from the beginning). It also allows you to delete old and obsolete files and to rename files. A word of caution if you rename a file or move it to another folder make sure you reflect those changes on your moodle course – pointing to an area which no longer holds your files makes no sense!

Edu-Application of the week

I have blogged previously about how I am running a course on using IT to enhance learning and teaching. Last week we did a session on cooperative learning using photostory as the IT tool. Those who are familiar with photostory will testify that it has a very easy to use interface – allows for easy transfer of visuals and voice-overs (great for the visual and auditory learner) and the active participation in creating the photostory should serve the kinasthetic learner well. It is not available for mac. The teacher-students on my course really enjoyed using it and it is well worth considering as a tool to harness a presentation of a group.

I-App of the week
We are currently encouraging departments in our school to blog. We are hoping that a set of dynamic and oft updated subject blogs will emerge over the coming weeks. School blogging at this level is also an indicator of “ICT Culture” in the NCTE framework.  An easy way to keep blogs updated is by using the wordpress app.

Website of the week

There has been alot of talk about using i-pads in the classroom recently. This led me to the Apple (Ireland) – Education site http://www.apple.com/ie/education/why-apple/ there are lots of useful tutorials and articles to at least get you to a level of understanding!

PLN Corner

If you are keen to expand your twitter network with some interesting followers then I highly recommend that you tune in to

#edchat.ie on Monday nights. The discussion is run by @fredboss and is a rich source of inspiration on many educational topics.