United Classrooms - Connect Your Classroom With the World

United Classrooms is a service connecting classrooms across the world. The service allows teachers to create classroom profile pages. On their classroom profile pages teachers can post assignments, projects, messages for students, and announcements for parents and students. Teachers can monitor and manage all of the communications between students on the classroom profile page.

United Classrooms allows teachers to share their classroom profile pages with the world. Teachers can search for other classrooms and connect with them. When classrooms are connected students can post messages for each other on the classroom profile pages.

Applications for Education
Using United Classrooms could be a good way for teachers to connect their classrooms to work on collaborative projects. On a smaller scale you could just connect your classrooms to create virtual penpal relationships. And if you don't connect your classroom to another you could use United Classrooms just as a way to share classroom news with the parents of your students.


United Classrooms from United Classrooms on Vimeo.

Collaborative Writing Across Multiple Grade Levels

Last Thursday after my presentation at The Literacy Promise conference I sat in on Brad Wilcox's presentation about inspiring students to write. One of the things that he mentioned was having high school students edit the writing of elementary school students. As Brad said during his presentation, "high school students don't care about comma placement in their own work, but they care about it when it is an elementary school student's work because they don't want to give bad directions." He went on to suggest having elementary school students put their writings in an envelope and addressing it to students in their district's high school.

Google Documents is designed for exactly what Brad Wilcox described in his presentation at The Literacy Promise conference. If your school district is using Google Apps for Education, sharing the documents is very easy to do. Have the elementary school students share their documents with a high school student, that student's teacher, and yourself. When the document is shared between all four of you, you and the other teacher can make sure that the suggestions made by the high school student are correct. Introduce all of the students to using the commenting feature in Google Docs to write comments and corrections in the margins of documents. By using the commenting feature, the actual changes to the document have to be carried out by the elementary school student.

If you want to learn how to use Google Documents, including the commenting feature, please read my free ebook Google Documents for Teachers.

Schedule Project Due Dates in Wikispaces

If you assign wiki editing due dates to your students' wiki projects, Wikispaces has just launched a new feature just for you. Events is a Wikispaces feature that allows you to schedule due dates for Wikispaces Projects. When you schedule a Wikispaces Event you can specify a lock time for your project. Once that lock time is reached no one is able to make any further edits to that page. Watch the short video below to learn more about Wikispaces Events.



Applications for Education
Wikispaces Events doesn't change the way that students use Wikispaces, but it does make it easier for you to manage your students' work in Wikispaces.

Trello Helps You Organize Group Projects

Trello is a free service designed to help individuals and groups manage tasks. Trello's user interface features a basic virtual corkboard-like space to which you and your collaborators can pin task cards. Task cards can be arranged into columns such as "to do," "in progress," and "completed." You can name and arrange the columns however you see fit. Each task card on your Trello board can be assigned to individuals in your group. Trello allows you to create and be a member of multiple boards.

The video below offers a detailed introduction to Trello.


To start using Trello you can register for a Trello account of sign up using your Google Account credentials.

Applications for Education
For students working on group projects Trello could be a great tool for assigning and keeping track of the responsibilities of each group member.

Olympic Challenge 2012 - Olympics-inspired Lessons

Through a Tweet from Jen Deyenberg earlier this week I learned about a neat collaborative project started by Chris Leach. Olympic Challenge 2012 is a series of academic challenges based upon Summer Olympic events. Right now there are twenty-two challenges proposed. Teachers can sign-up to have their students "challenge" other classrooms. Or you could simply have your students try the challenges without challenging another classroom. Here's one of the fun challenges in the list; Tennis: draw faces on tennis balls and then animate them to tell a story.

Search Team - Collaborative Web Search

Search Team is an interesting service that is best described as a collaborative search tool. The purpose of Search Team is to enable small teams to collaborate on finding the best information on the web.

Here's how it works: sign into Search Team and enter the topic you're searching for, this becomes known as the "search space." The search space is where you will enter your search terms, refine searches, and save the best results. When you share your search space with others they can see what you've saved and what you've eliminated.

Watch the videos below to learn more about Search Team.
Overview.

How-to.


Applications for Education
Search Team could be a great tool for students working on collaborative research projects. Search Team provides a format that can help students eliminate having duplicate resources in their reference materials.

DropEvent - Collaborative Photo Albums via Email

Drop Event is a free service for creating public and private group photo albums. To create a group photo album you do need to register for the service, but contributors to your photo album don't need to register. When you create your photo album it is assigned an email address that contributors can send photos to through email. To invite people to contribute to your album, just give them the email address assigned to your album.

Thanks to Kristen Swanson for the info about Drop Event.

Applications for Education
If you've ever wanted to have your students contribute to a group album, but were deterred by the requirements for students to create accounts, Drop Event could be the solution you're looking for. Using Drop Event photography students could email contributions of their works to an album. Recently take students on a field trip? Have them and their parents email contributions to a group album.