I don't really need another place to blog, but the Writing Initiative that I direct at
Passaic County Community College has an
Initiative blog that we use to communicate with our campus community. Though some of the posts are directed directly at our students and faculty, a number of the resources we write about are useful to anyone doing writing across the curriculum.
For example, today's post is about an article from
The New York Times on
"Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools." The tools include free online sites to help students visualize texts (with tools like
Wordle,
Tagxedo or
The New York Times Visualization Lab), create timelines (using
Xtimeline,
Time Glider or
Timetoast) and design presentations that go beyond PowerPoint (with
Glogster.edu and
Museum Box).
For prewriting, mind maps on paper, and now electronically, are popular idea-processing tools. Their use was popularized by the
British IQ specialist Tony Buzan starting in the 1960s.
Bubbl.us,
CoSketch.com and
Cacoo are good starting places that also allow collaboration by student pairs or groups. Of course, students can also use
The Times for generating ideas on many topics across disciplines from
math to
fine arts.
