Responding and Reflecting; Colaborating and Collecting

If you've ever used Wallwisher, you know how powerful such a tool can be in creating collaboration and on-line dialogue between students.

Lino It is a similar online bulletin board, allowing anonymous and instant posting, permitting only the posters (and the administrator) to move or peel off the stickies that have been added. It's super easy with few frills to distract students. It's easily embeddable to most web sites and wikis, retaining full functionality.

Check out the example of students responding to Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Sparrow" which was read in juxtaposition to Poe's "The Raven." You can see that this group of four students generated a bunch of questions they wanted to discuss, and even posted a picture, the poem, and a related video to the wall. 

Interestingly, some groups assigned stickies by color to each member, while others decided that "blue is vocabulary, and pink is questions," and so on.

One neat feature of Lino It is History, which highlights the ten most recent additions, allowing users to quickly see what was added since their last visit (when you view the example, click on Highlight New, and then keep clicking the arrow beside it to view the ten latest additions).

Applications for the Reading/Language Arts Classroom:

• Demand Exit Tickets: all students respond to an open ended question based on the day's lesson.
• Collect Ten Word Stories, ala Sparky Teaching's Ten Word Stories page. This ten word story might be a reflection on a day's lit piece.
• Ask students to list running questions or observations about a challenging text piece.
• Encourage students to collect colorful figurative language and "cool sentences" from their reading that they would like to discuss during later close reading sessions. Some of these sentences can later be submitted to Notable Sentences... for Imitation and Creation (see my write-up here).
• Add a "What's New and Notable" bulletin board to your teacher's page. Include assignment updates, links to current events, etc. See mine at the bottom of my main site.
• Share files and videos related to classroom discussion topics.
• Get instant student responses to poems, song lyrics, facts, and quotations, perhaps as a warm-up to each day's lesson.
• Allow students to record thoughts and questions as they watch a video or read a chapter.
• Check out more ideas at this blog.

Notes and Caveats:

• Limit the number of users on a single board to five or less. Otherwise, you'll have too much traffic and many redundant responses.
• If you care to know who posted which items, instruct students to include their initials on posts. As mentioned above, some students chose to assign a different color to each member to differentiate responses.