Using Read/Write Web Tools in the Classroom

Using Read/Write Web Tools in the Classroom

iGoogle has become one of my favorite online tools. I’m just beginning to tap intof using it for personal productivity,and I can see many possibilities for using it for classroom communication and school work. If I were still in the classroom, I think that I would insist--with parent permission, of course--that my students open their own iGoogle accounts and begin using a combination of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Notebook, and Blogger. (Since I first drafted this, I have also come to discover Zoho, another comprehensive suite of online tools that do pretty much the same thing.) iGoogle is the primary tool that I am basing the following lesson plan suggestions for teachers to adopt in their classrooms:

I. Book logging and reviews

I just finished helping one of our English teachers try to catch her students cheating on their book reports. Her students were going online, finding different suggestions on Amazon or on the book jacket, and then printing them as their own. I’ve never been a particular fan of the book report format, myself, but it’s not my class. I came to adopt a variation of Nancie Atwell’s book log format in which students daily logged the number of pages that they read along with a short 2 or 3 sentence summary of what they’ve read. They turned these in to me at the end of the week and I gave them credit for it.

A technological adaptation of this is to create an online database that is available for students via their Google Docs page. I have kept track of my own reading that way for the past few years, and the form could be quickly adapted. Students could log on daily, weekly, or at the end of reading a book and quickly summarize what they have read. By using Google Docs, students can access the file from home or from school, write up their summaries, and have the spreadsheet total up the pages and/or time read for the week. By controlling the sharing and publication of the documents, students can invite the teacher and/or their parents to inspect the document when they have it ready to turn in.

When a student has finished a book, they can also make recommendations to other members of the class to read, or not, the book they have just finished. There are a number of good sites to do this. One way would be the creation of a Classroom book blog. With a Google Docs account, students could write a short reviews and then have the reviews published to blogger.com. Another option is using ListMania! through Amazon. I’m not sure what it would take to give students access to the list, but it would be available for the rest of the class, or the rest of the school, to look at when they are deciding what to read next.

II. Collaborative Research

I have not done a very good job helping our students become better online researchers. When they go online, they tend to Google a few search term, find a few sites that may have some relevance, and then print off the page with the idea that they will take notes later. In reality, they don’t take notes--and teachers generally don’t ask them for their notes--and then they tend to copy passages wholesale into their papers. And actually, anymore, teachers accept Powerpoint presentations in lieu of papers. Many of the students copy and paste information directly from the sources directly onto the Powerpoint slides, and then spend a lot of time trying to get their bibliographies right for super picky teachers.

OK, may be I exaggerate just a bit, but it’s too true to be comfortable.

That’s why I think that Google Notebook has a lot of possibilities. Especially with the Google Notebook plugin, students can pull up an online site, highlight the information that they think is important, and clip the passage directly into the Notebook. A link back to the site is automatically put into the clip for easy reference back to the site, especially when students need to build those pesky bibliographies with a tool like Citation Machine. When the clipped passage is saved, boxes opens on the bottom of the passage to add comments and tags to the information. I think this is an ideal place to have students summarize the information in their own words and tell why they think it is important. Not only will the students have captured the direct quote, they will also need to show that they understand what is going on. If teachers are closely monitoring the research process, they can compare the direct quote with the comment and suggest changes and reworking of the material to avoid plagiarism. Of course, teachers will need to spend quite a bit more time teaching students to summarize. It’s a hard cognitive process, I think, and one that we probably don’t stress enough, but one that I think is absolutely essential for students demonstrating that they actually understand what they are reading.

From Google Notebook, it’s easy to set up a collaboration effort between students. Students can enable others to work with them, either clipping additional information or making comments and/or tags on the notes that have already been clipped. Another option is to “publish” the notebook to Google Docs, allowing for either limited or public access to the new document for editing or comments. With Google Docs, students can share the a document as they begin drafting their research, or they can upload/download files directly into their own computers, saving the changes with different names. Google Docs has a highlighter available--in different colors--so that students can use to show the changes that they have made. Another possibility here is clipping whatever changes have been made back into Google Notebook and making comments on why those changes have been made.

Finally, it’s a fairly easy step to publish the final product from Google Docs to Blogger when the final draft is ready for comments. Publication has been a step that is often given short shrift in the writing process, but we know that it really is important in helping students clean up their writing and preparing it for an audience. Hopefully, the teacher has been able to oversee the project all along so that the final project is truly ready for publication. While the document can be published directly as a web page in Google Docs, the comment feature in Blogger allows the teacher, other students, administrators, and parents to read the result and to make comments on the paper.

III. Active Reading

One of the more interesting uses of Google Notebook might be using it to show active reading by students. This can be useful in helping to teach summarizing, as in the collaborative project above, or in just having students show that they are actually understanding and/or relating to the information that they are reading. Through the use of a social bookmarking site, such as Del.icio.us, teachers can direct students’ reading to a selected number of articles. If the teacher is aware of her students’ SRI lexile scores, it’s pretty easy to run some of the articles through the lexile analyzer at Lexile.com and get lexile scores for the passages.

I used to spend hours building comprehension and study guides for the novels and essays that we read in my English classes. Sometimes the students answered my questions directly on the guide, and sometime I had them choose selected questions to answer in their daybooks. Using Google Notebook, the students can be asked to show their reading reading skills directly with the passages, much like using sticky notes. With Google Notebook, the students can read and clip a passage and then use the comment feature to summarize, analyze or relate to the passage, building those text to text, text to self, or text to world connections that we stress through active reading. Then the students can share their clippings and responses with the teacher, perhaps through Google Docs, where the passages can be highlighted, edited, and/or commented upon by the teacher. Students can then move these archived documents into a folder on Google Docs, building up a cache of documents over time, complete with teacher comments, so that students can assemble online portfolios to be shared with teachers, parents, counselors, and administrators.