Free Technology for Schools

Screenshot of the Edutech Review

A little while ago, I wrote about how using Twitter and Paperli, you can develop a visually appealing way of collating professional learning from other educators you follow on Twitter. Today I would like to show how this can be used to give students a weekly summary of learning that has taken place in school. To do this I need to first explain what the school would need to do to set this up.
At the beginning of the school year, each teacher in the school would need to create a Twitter account and a blog, wiki or website. Each student in the school would then also create a Twitter account and be guided through the process of creating a newspaper on Paperli using the Twitter feeds from all of their teachers as sources. Each week the teacher either creates blog posts or even just finds useful relevant websites and posts a link to them on Twitter. The students will then have a newspaper which shows all the learning that has taken place that week.
This could become an exceptionally powerful tool. For teachers who don't feel they have time to create new content, they can always just post a link to a useful website, or even tweet this week's homework and it will show up in the paper. Other more technically minded teachers could end up generating lots of useful content to share with students.
If a school did this it would be an excellent starting point but imagine the potential for learning if students are also encouraged to keep their own learning blogs. Students would be able to see what their friends have been learning and creating and there is no reason why a student in year 11 cannot follow students in the years above to see where their current learning will lead to. Now that is what I call a powerful learning community. So what are you waiting for. Get Papertweeting!