Developing Digital Skills in my Classroom : Writing for the Web

When we're talking about writing things on the web, we're going to try and split this into two categories:

Online discussion
Publishing

1. Online Discussion

an effective prompt
preparation
practice
facilitation

Online discussions bring lots of benefits: a) watching, b) thinking, c) contributing. As teachers we must ensure that the student will take part in all three phases of online discussion. The have to watch, to think and to contribute to the discussion.

We have to create some community guidelines. The best community guidelines are made by the students themselves.

There are lots of different types of online conversations:
Back channeling
Online discussion (forum)
Open Concersation (#tag)

Neat Chat is a good way to create a quick discussion forum. It's free to use and you basically send a quick URL to the people you want to participate. It will save the discussion for a number of days, so that students who were absent from class can bo back and have a look.

Twitter is an example of a public conversation linked with #hashtags. The course is using #eLearningCourse, but there are a lot of hashtags we can use to get informed from specific discussions.

There are other tools, which can be used for back channeling, e.g. todaysmeet and scribblar. A backchanneling is a converation that goes in the background that's talking about the main learning task. Both todaysmeet and scribblar are very effective.

It's very important that technology doesn't turn into a distraction.

2. Publishing

Ollie points out that the power of online publishing is in the audience. Audience is an important thing for school and schools and classrooms should be built having the audience in mind. Further more he shows us an example from such kind of a school, the Monkseaton Highschool in the Northeast of England.