A few months ago, I wrote about Goodreads. (Check out the post here.) A fifth grade teacher was trying out this site with her students on a voluntary basis. Recently, she surveyed the students who opted to use this site instead of the traditional, paper reading log. Here are the results: 78% of the students [...]

Will Richardson’s article “Publishers, Participants All” in the February 2011 Educational Leadership really struck me this week. We all tell our students and children not to talk to strangers. Safety is paramount whether we’re on the street or online. However, if we really want to get students embedded in a global community of sharing, we [...]

Looking to increase students’ vocabularies? Or make learning about parts of speech more engaging? PicLits is a web site that lives up to its slogan: ‘Inspired Picture Writing’. You choose a photograph from the site’s gallery. Based on the picture selected, the site supplies a word bank  of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and a category called [...]

TweenTribune is an online newspaper that is written exclusively for “tweens”, 8-14 years old. The goal is to get kids hooked on reading and seeking out news on a daily basis. To promote this behavior, TweenTribune updates daily with stories that are kid-friendly from reliable sources (such as AP and CNN). Two other appealing features [...]