Tool 6

Wow! I didn't realize there were so many tools for promoting discussion in and out of the classroom! I am already familiar with several of these, but I wasn't thinking about these as "discussion promoters." I already use Google Docs, which the more I use it, the more value I see in terms of discussion, or at least getting students to express their thoughts. I have had the opportunity to use Today's Meet and Poll Everywhere several times in professional development settings. I have not tried either of these with students, but would like to try Today's Meet - especially with 4th and 5th graders. I have used Skype several times and know that there are many opportunities for using Skype in the library. One time during our weekly Books and Breakfast, one of our teachers was out of town, so she Skyped with her group. The students were so excited and their weekly discussion was great!!

One tool that has been new to me is Twitter. This was something that I wasn't really interested in using, not being one to "put all me business out there" so to speak, or read about what someone had for dinner. However, this summer at the November Learning Symphony, we were asked to create a Twitter account to use during the 3 days of training. They taught us about the power of Twitter when it comes to education. Quite frankly, I was amazed! We learned about hashtags and how to search for educational ones. Another tool they showed us was TweetDeck, which is a separate application that allows you to sort your Twitter feed into different categories for easy reading. I have downloaded TweetDeck and have just started using it. I still have a lot to learn about Twitter and TweetDeck, especially in customizing it for my use, but I have been pleasantly surprised at how useful this tool can be for education. I have signed up to follow CoolCatTeacher and let me tell you - she Tweets A LOT!! Tons of good information, but it is hard to find the time to read it all.

The other tool I tried for #6 was Wallwisher. I have seen this used before, but didn't think much of it until I started seeing some of the ideas the other teachers on my campus were posting for Wallwisher. I created one thinking specifically about Books and Breakfast, a weekly book club at our school for 4th and 5th graders. Each week during Books and Breakfast, students have a different question or discussion starter to answer based on their reading. We create bookmark for students, so they can keep track of each week's topic and their thinking, but I wonder if we could add a technology piece to it as well. Having a question posted each week on a Wallwisher, would give students another opportunity to interact with each other and their reading. All Wallwishers could be embedded into a Books and Breakfast wiki so that all groups would be able to see them. I think I am going to give this a try this year! The Wallwisher I created is posted below. If you have read the book, post a thought!