What Tech Tools are You Using to Support Writers?

I am preparing a three-part workshop for elementary teachers to familiarize them with different tech tools they could use to support their students as writers.

I am just getting started planning it. I know I will share some tools currently being used by teachers at my school. For example, one teacher has her students posting their poetry to a discussion board in Blackboard. I am amazed by the depth of the comments the classmates are leaving for the poets.

Another teacher is using Google Docs for working on mechanics and writing skills. The children follow a link from his website and then join in the activity, such as expanding a sentence, writing a better ending.

One class has research and then storyboarded movies on cyberbullying. Another uses Movie Maker to have the children create illustrated movies of their poems.

We have teachers using VoiceThread to create student book reviews. Others using Shelfari for students to recommend books to classmates. (NOTE: Most of these were not my ideas. We have a great staff so I am constantly learning from them.)

This will be a three part workshop that should show increasingly more advanced uses with each new sessions. I would very much like to crowd source it. Please complete the survey below to tell me your ideas for using tech to support, enhance, nurture student writers.

I know the survey doesn't work well with this Blogger template. Yet another reason why I need to move to WordPress. Please hit return any time you are in danger of typing off the page.

The last question is optional. However, if you give me your name I will be able to thank you in the credits of my presentation.

When you are done, please scroll to the end and press the submit button.

Thank you.

Does Your Blog Have a Gender?

Today, Lancerlord shares information about The Gender Genie. Paste a chunk of text from your blog into the Gender Genie, and it will make an educated guess as to whether the chunk was written by a male or female.

How does it work? The site says...

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

I tried it with a short entry that was judged far more feminine than masculine. Then I read that it works best on text with 500 or more words, so I plunked in a larger text and that was much more masculine than feminine. Dejá vu! Way back in college, the professional inventories I took listed me as scoring similarly as male teachers who liked their jobs, but not female teachers who did. Whatever.

Give it a try. Let us know how it did with your writing.