Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter

It has been nearly two years since I first posted about Twitter on ICTinEnglish. It is proving to be a valuable tool to connect me with my personal learning network and it has been interesting following the impact this micro-blogging tool has had on education, global communication and social networking.

All the while though I try to keep in mind audience and how many are actually participating. While one report has found New Zealanders rank number 6 in the world for twitter use in relation to population size this is still only a little over 3% of our total population!

Still a great way to connect with others of similar interest so here's another one for the ICT in English audience: Literary Tweets: 100+ of the Best Authors on Twitter a listing of more than 100 authors active on Twitter compiled by Mashable.com

Exploring team blogging and warnings from the surgeon general!

The ICTinEnglish blog evolved a couple of years ago in response to the increased interest in Web 2.0 and blogging through the ICTinEnglish forum.

The purpose of this blog is to explore team blogging and the possibilities for learning and teaching in New Zealand schools. A number of authors have added value to the blog over time, contributing posts, sharing ideas and experiences about learning through ICT and highlighting projects of interest.

Team blogging can be a useful option if you want to collaborate and share with others online or if you are new to blogging and want to explore options before considering setting up your own. Also if you have questions, add a comment to the blog or post to the list serv as there is a forever growing community of support through the network.

Some recommendations that have come through my RSS and Twitter in the past month...

Free online library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast. WARNING — The surgeon general reports that having these many free books at your disposal can be highly addictive.

The "Rare Book Room" site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Educational videos for students available online that have been previewed and catcgorised under English, Sciences and Maths.

Wordle according to Jen Wagner!

Wordle is a nifty wee web tool for creating word clouds that has grown in popularity in the past year. Lots of possibilities for creative use in the classroom as shared here by Jen Wagner.
Follow Jen Wagner on twitter.

Wordle Ideas

View more OpenOffice presentations from JenniferW.

'Enhanced English Teacher'

Are you familiar with the Enhanced English Teacher blog? Written by Tara Seale, a 9th grade English teacher. Have enjoyed reading some recent posts see (Sharing the Solitary Self for a Greater Mind) Also a valuable and informative post on Google Apps with Students
You may find this useful if you are considering for your class as Tara explores both the pros and cons.
Do you have any favourite blogs from English teachers you can recommend? Please share in the comments for this post. Or if you are a member of the blog write a short post highlighting key features.

30 Ideas for Inspiring Writing!

Thanks to Mark Warner (via AllanhK) for sharing these strategies for using e-learning to inspire students' writing. Click the image below to view on Google Docs.

E-fellowships, e-learning and literacy

I am the Head of English Faculty at Auckland Girls' Grammar School and this year I have been lucky enough to be awarded an E-fellowship which is allowing me a little time and support to conduct an inquiry project looking at how online communities and blogs can be used as part of the preparation and formative assessment for Formal Writing (AS90053).

In this proposed inquiry project I am aiming to critically reflect on the practice of formal writing, as a formative task through the use of an online classroom community (the class wiki) which provides students with the topics and related live links to resources for a range of formal writing topics. The formal writing practise will be completed in the context of individual student blogs. The blog will then provide a platform for guided and non-guided collaborative writing, peer and teacher feed-forward and feedback.

I then wish to look at the effects of these practices on the learner, to see the impact this approach has on student participation, engagement and improvement of literacy levels as illustrated in their production of formal writing. I am also hoping to measure how realistic and successful this approach is in comparison to more traditional in class written practice and potentially measuring whether using an environment (that of the online community) that our students feel comfortable in, enhances the development of their literacy levels.
If you are keen to see how this all goes throughout the year, I will be posting my updates and reflections here.

Here's hoping my hunch is right that increased engagement may equate to greater success! You can check out how I used this project last year by following the link http://thevirtualclassroom.pbwiki.com/Wikis+in+English

Claire Amos

Auckland Girls' Grammar School

Team 2 Tells Tales

I am Year 3 Teacher at Pt England School in Auckland. I became a lead teacher for the Manaiakalani cluster during 2008 when my team leader went on maternity leave. The hook our project,Team 2 Tells Tales, used for our children was digital story telling.

I selected 5 children in my class, based on their writing and oral language levels, to be in my target group. We followed the literacy cycle you can see below. Typically we started with writing stories. These children then edited their stories with me. We used iMovie to film our stories as the students read them aloud. The movies were then published on our blog. Once on our blog the wider audience were able to view them and leave comments. The children viewed their stories over and over again and reflected on themselves and on the comments they recieved.
Not every story the students wrote was published as a digital story, but they usually had one published each week.
eLearning is integrated into all subjects in my class. We used some of the children's eLearning work in other curriculum areas (often illustrated in Kid Pix) to create movies with voice overs to post on the blog too. Sometimes we published photos displaying our work in a bubbleshare slideshow using to show the process the students went through.

In 2009 we will continue to use digital story telling as our main hook in our literacy. I hope to use other web2 tools eg. VoiceThread. However I have a new class so that means new children to introduce to this exciting way of learning. We have renamed our blog Room 10 @ Pt England School.
Priscilla Lavakula
Pt England School