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Building Schoolwide Literacy With Free Web 2.0 Tools
A Grade by Grade Elementary Model

Curriculum varies widely from school district to school district and state to state. These project ideas will help teachers envision ways that a focused set of web 2.0 tools can help students build skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening as they master concepts and skills across the curriculum.

Grade 5

Tools: All previous tools, now done by individual students/partners. Possibly embed results in a class wiki as a single collection point for sharing and linking to all projects from a central place.

Grade 5 Ideas for Building Literacy with web 2.0 tools:

Wordle: Personal terminology/vocabulary wordless as study aids, favorite words and expressions from literature, word choice/connotation/vocabulary collections such as words that mean “tall” or words that create mental images, personal visual thesaurus images (collect on a student thesaurus wiki)

Mapskip: Class or student-created maps of US history: annotated tales of westward expansion, colonial times, Revolutionary War sites etc. Landform maps of the state, U.S., or world with markers (“stories”) about each landform and images included.

Bookemon: Diary of a pioneer, a colonist, a space explorer. Student-made science notebooks on magnetism, light, electricity or other science topics, including written explanations of digital pictures and hands-on experiments. A Field Guide to the Plants and Trees in your schoolyard (digital pictures and Including basic bibliography of sources). An illustrated scientist’s journal of an investigation following scientific method.

Voicethread: Narrated explanations of the science concept illustrated in digital pictures uploaded from class science experiments. Student-created digital drawings of cells, plant parts, etc., narrated and explained: A Guided Tour of A Cell (Including basic bibliography of sources). An Audio Field Guide to the Plants and Trees in your school yard (digital pictures). Listening to comments from others.

GlogsterEDU: multimedia explanations of an animal or plant classification, Poetry collections with images, conservation posters (Including basic bibliography of sources), Thesaurus Glog: images and words related to a central word or concept, Illustrated figures of speech. Issue posters for environmental concerns, mock elections, etc. Informational posters explaining graphs, tables, and other study aids; graphic organizers with linked resources and bibliographies, homonym posters