Thing #6

Writeboard

Writeboard won second place for Collaborative Writing and Word Processing from Web 2.0 Awards. I found it to be a very easy to navigate and understand website. It immediately struck me as having great potential to be used as a tool in the classroom/school. I believe that it can be used for constructive peer editing. At a elementary level, students can work in pairs or groups on peer editing/correcting each others assignments before turning them in. I believe at a middle school level it could work well for a language arts class as a daily or weekly homework assignment. Have a very poorly constructed piece posted and request each student to log in and find or make one correction. The way the tool works it will be easy to see which students make what correction. I believe that at a high school level it can work in peer editing. Most students should be able to edit their own papers by that grade level, but it is important to get feedback or have the opportunity to run an idea off another student. This would promote team work and encouraging students to use the resources (other people) as well. The nice thing about the versions function and user function is that the teacher can follow and track how much editing is being down, if one student is relying on another student to make many corrections, many suggestions, and eventually, in essence, write the paper for them.