The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”

I’ve been spending time over this past year reflecting and evaluating on how I can be more effective in teaching writing — both to English Language Learners and my mainstream ninth-grade students. In fact, all the English teachers at our school have been doing the same thing. Our school got a grant that enabled us to contract with the California Writing Project to do ongoing teacher development.

In addition to that work, those of us who teach English Language Development (which is what most others call ESL) classes have been refining our work with the extraordinary The Write Institute curriculum.

I’ve also been thinking more about the idea of students writing for an “authentic audience” — in other words, someone other than me.

In practice, so far that’s meant my ELL’s writing penpal letters (with pen and on paper) to students (who would respond) in another mainstream English class, and that has worked very well for both classes.

In addition, students have enjoyed participating in our International Sister Classes project, but, because of other commitments, I haven’t made that much of a priority this year (I hope to do better next year!). Developing online presentations is great, though time consuming, and then there’s the responsibility of communicating and commenting back-and-forth. Of course, there are a lot of benefits to that kind of relationship, too, which is why I want to re-engage in the fall.

I’ve also been trying to pull together a list of easy online sites where students write more for an “authentic audience” and meet the following criteria:

* The writing required would be short, not lengthy pieces, that could be done in a reasonable amount of time — a few days at a maximum and preferably less.

* The creating and posting process is simple — accessible both to my English Language Learner students and to me.

* Posting the piece does not necessarily require any kind of ongoing commitment for communication — once it’s up, it might be interesting to check-back after awhile to see if there have been any reactions (if the site is set-up for that kind of involvement), but it’s really just a matter of sticking it up there in a place that gets a fair amount of “traffic” and knowing that it’s likely others will read it.

* There seems to be some kind of enforced standards for all the content that’s posted on the site. In other words, when students explore it to see models of what others have written, it’s unlikely they will encounter something that is inappropriate for classroom use.

With that criteria in mind, here are my picks for The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience” (not in order of preference):

What Percent lets you state a simple opinion, which people can then vote on by saying they agree or disagree with you. I didn’t see any inappropriate content on the site, so I assume they keep a close eye on it.

Recipe Key lets you drag-and-drop items into a virtual pantry, and then provides recipes of dishes you might be able to prepare with them. More importantly, students can also write for an authentic audience by contributing their own recipes.

Recipe Snap is another similar site with a very scaffolded system for users to write their own recipes.

Yelp is the enormously popular site where people write reviews about everything. Sometimes you’ll see other reviews that might have inappropriate language and haven’t been removed yet, but that problem seems pretty rare.

Town Me is a brand-new “Yelp”-like site where users can write reviews of restaurants, stores, tourist attractions, etc.

Rate It All is another site where users can post reviews about everything. Some advantages that Rate It All, however, has over those other listed sites are that you can post a review without being registered, and you can post it via email, too. That’s a great advantage if school content filters block the review sites themselves. Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip. Their post explains more about how Rate It All works. (Rate It All left this comment on my original post: “ESL educators can submit themselves to our database here: http://www.rateitall.com/promote. By doing so, a unique email address will be generated for them, allowing them to easily solicit feedback and reviews directly from their students.)

Book reviews are great writing opportunities. ELL teacher Jennifer Duarte had some challenges having her students write ones for Amazon (not least of which being you have to buy something before they let you publish a review). Shelfari, though, seems like a very reasonable alternative. Students can create their own virtual bookshelf and write reviews of them.

Library Thing is similar to Shelfari, and is another good place for writing book reviews. Book Army is another review site.

Zunal is a free and easy way for students (and teachers) to create webquests (though they might be more appropriately called Internet Scavenger Hunts). Zunal also acts as the host for the webquest or scavenger hunt after its been created. All “webquests” that are created using their fairly scaffolded system are listed on the site, so there are plenty of examples.

Lunch is another new review/recommendation site somewhat different from Yelp. You can read about it at Read Write Web. It’s still in “private” testing, but I received an invite within seconds.

Writing reviews about places where students traveled or lived is another good writing opportunity. They can leave comments on places at Trip Wolf, Planet Eye, or on Go Planit, three large travel guides on the web. Here are some recent additions to this list that also related to travel:

Travel DK, which lets you easily create your own online travel guides including writing reviews of attractions (Thanks to Diana Dell for the tip).

Discover America, which is a similar travel site that lets you write reviews (obviously, just places in the U.S.).

I’ve posted about Culture Crossing before. It’s a wonderful social studies resource, but I neglected to include that it would be a great opportunity for authentic writing, too. It’s a unique resource for information about different countries. It provides some basic demographics, but it also shares details about communication style, dress, gestures, etc. It’s unlike any other source of information about countries that’s on the web, and accepts user contributions. Certainly, English Language Learners are well-positioned to write about their native countries.

Earth.org is an online travel guide that makes it easy to find information about places around the world and, more importantly, makes it quite easy to add info, too.

Students can pick a painting, or create their own artwork, and then write a story about it at The Art of Storytelling. It’s a site from the Delaware Art Museum that allows you to not only do either one of those activities, but you can also record your story with your computer microphone. Plus, you can read and listen to stories written and spoken by others. It’s extraordinarily simple, and extraordinarily accessible to any level of English Language Learner. No registration is required.

Myths and Legends is a United Kingdom site where students can create slideshows about……myths and legends. It’s pretty neat and easy, and has the added great benefit of letting students record the narration for their story. Teachers have to register, and they’re very open to schools participating from around the world. All the stories that have been created are available for viewing. This application seems to require more writing, and the posted content seems to be more controlled, then a number of other multimedia sites I considered for inclusion in this list.

Scribd also seems to me to be a good place to upload a variety of student writing, especially now since they’ve supposedly removed all pornography from the site. They used to have a great text-to-speech feature, but they’ve eliminated it.

Students can leave a comment on a positive news story at Optimist World. The stories are engaging and relatively accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. Because of the nature of the site, students are less likely to encounter some of the rude, inappropriate, and incoherent comments that are often left at more traditional news sites. You’re supposed to also be able to contribute stories to the site, but it’s not clear to me how that’s done.

Moment Tracker lists key events in modern history. You pick one, and you’re shown a map that indicates the key event and what happened. On the same map, you see other pins indicating where other people where at that moment. Click on the pins, and you can read where they were and what they were feeling at that moment. You, too, can write about your own experience.

Students both asking and answering questions at the various online Wiki-like sites like Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and Wikianswers (yes, the last two are indeed different sites) are definitely examples of writing for an “authentic audience.” I had considered including students writing in Simple English Wikipedia, but decided that it was just too complicated for English Language Learners (and even me!). These question/answer sites, though, are pretty simple.

Dogo News is a site designed for young people “of fun and inspiring news from all around the world.” It’s written in relatively simple English with short articles, and is accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. Readers vote on which articles they like, and can leave comments. Because it’s easy to leave comments, and they appear to be moderated, I’m adding the site to this list.

My Hero is a site where students can write about people they view as…heroes. You can register and create a multimedia webpage about your choices, but, even better (at least, in my view), you can go to the Guestbook area and write a short piece that appears immediately (there are automatic filters to screen content, plus it’s manually screened later).

Tikatok a site that is a real find for English Language Learners (and lots of other students). Users can create online books that they write and illustrate (they can also use lots of images available on the site). It has a number of features that really make it stand-out. You can make a book from scratch, or you can use one of their many story frames that contain “prompts” to help the story-writer along. In addition, you can invite others to collaborate online with you to develop the book.

Once the book is done you can email the link to a friend, teacher, or yourself for posting on a blog, website, or online journal and the site is available on Titatok for others to read. You can create the online version for free, but have to pay if you want them to print a hard-copy version.

Tar Heel Reader has two great features: 1) It has 1,000 simple books with audio support for the text immediately accessible to Beginning English Language Learners and 2) It makes it as simple as you can get for students to create their own “talking” books using images from Flickr.

Anybody can read the books on the site. However, in order to have your students create talking books using their “easy as pie” (and free) process, you need to register and have to have a code. They’re rightfully concerned about publishing the code because of spammers. Gary Bishop from the site, though, is happy to provide it to teachers. Just write him at gb@cs.unc.edu and he’ll send it to you.

At the Destinations website, users first write the location of a place they would like to visit, and then a very brief explanation of why they want to go there. Their response is then shown on a map of the area they chose, along with the url address of their place and what they wrote. The website creators send out a “tweet” on Twitter after each time someone responds, and they review each response and consider placing it on their regular front page “rotation.” All this can be done without registering.

Students can make a “top ten” list of anything they want — cars, books, video games — and describe the reasons for their rankings. Two popular sites that encourage user contributions (and make it easy to do so) are Lists Of Bests and The Top Tens.

Where To Be Today is a pretty neat site where users can write an entry about locations or events that would be good places to be…today.

Basically, after a simple registration, you can decide on a local place or event, or one that is at a distant location, and write about it. You can also search Flickr for images that would be appropriate photos, and identify the spot on a map. It’s then available for others who search for the area or type of event you’ve written about.

On Your Own C is a very cool-looking survey application designed to solicit opinions and comments about issues like tobacco, addiction, dress, and other items of particular interest (to teens, I think) — a question about UFO’s is in there, too.

Once you register, you can write a comment, though it doesn’t appear that you can get a url address specific to what you wrote. Even with that limitation, it would clearly be a high-interest site for students to use. They could always write their comments elsewhere (a blog or hard copy) and just copy and past on to “On Your Own C.”

Daytipper is the newest addition to this list.

I’m just going to quote from The Make Use of blog to describe it (it’s worth reading their whole post):

DayTipper is a platform for sharing practical daily life tips. It has more than 7500 published tips submitted by users in various categories (Buying/Selling, Travel, Education, Family, Household etc.) that provide insights to very specific everyday problems such as “How to make a room seem bigger” or “No more smelly feet”.

Student could easily develop and post their own short “tips.”

Nik Peachey has written a post describing an excellent writing activity for English Language Learners — write a story in fifty words. It’s definitely worth a look. Students can write one and post it at the Daily Lit website.

Students can contribute an article to Knol, Google’s answer to Wikipedia. It seems a lot easier technically to contribute to Knol than to Wikipedia.

Opposing Views highlights key questions (political, scientific, etc). It then, in a fairly succinct “bullet” format, has an “expert” share pro and con arguments. Users of the site can also leave their own comments. The language and lay-out of the site is fairly accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. After reading the arguments, users can easily leave their own comments on the issue.

Survival Strategies is a new interactive feature from The New York Times. People offer brief ideas on how they’re saving money now in the recession. Readers can vote on which ones they think are best. You have to register in order to vote, offer suggestions, or contribute your own.

BBC Memoryshare is a “place to share and explore memories.” The site has a cool-looking timeline where you can access memories that people have written — on just about anything. In addition, and most importantly for this post, you can contribute a memory (after quickly registering at the BBC). Each memory is accessible through the timeline, through a keyword, or through an individual url address.

Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world. You can leave comments if you’re registered. For that reason, I’m also adding it to this list. The speaking is pretty fast and relatively high-level, so it’s probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners. It does provide a transcript to the audio, but it’s not actually closed-captioned. That doesn’t make it particularly useful to ELL’s. It’s a well done site. I’m probably going to be using it more with my International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class than with my English Language Learners.

Project Label is a new site that I’m adding to this list. The site provides “social nutrition” labels to corporations based on a number of criteria including safety, nutrition, values, etc. The labels in large part are determined by users on the site who vote on the usefulness and validity of articles on the corporations that other users upload. Students can write their own articles to add, or can leave comments on the articles that others contribute, in addition to voting.

Blippr is a site where users can write reviews of computer applications, games, music, movies and books.

Timelines is a neat tool that lets users contribute towards making “timelines” of historical events with text, photos, and videos. People can then vote on which ones they like best, though everyone’s contributions appear to remain displayed. It’s extremely easy to contribute — much, much easier than to something like Wikipedia.

Share Your Ideas is a neat feature on the California Academy of Science website. Users can easily leave their ideas on how to help the environment, which then appear on sort of a bulletin-board like page. You can read more about the site here.

Words Move Me is a neat site from Sony where users add short book passages that have…moved them. Others can leave comments on the quotes.

Students can write-up simple tutorials on just about anything and submit them to LearnThat.

Twick it is designed to be sort of a version of Wikipedia. The difference is that every entry has to be 140 characters or less. In the future, once there are many entries, it might be a great source of information for English Language Learners. Now, however, it’s an excellent opportunity for students to identify topics, develop their own 140 character answer or description about the topic, and then post it to the site.

The BBC’s “A History Of The World” is a neat interactive timeline display of historical objects with images and commentary. Not only is it an accessible and engaging way to learn more about world history, but after a quick site registration you can contribute your own historical object choice to the collection and write about it.

Fwix pulls together local news stories from local news outlets in hundreds of cities throughout the world. You click on one city, and you get tons of media from the local papers, television, and other sources. It’s obviously a good place for learning about a place. For me, though, it’s particularly appealing for the ability to comment on the stories. Until it gets more popular, it will probably be free of the invective that you usually find in the comments section at the websites of the local news outlets themselves.

The New York Times recently launched Student Opinion “to create a “safe space” on NYTimes.com – and on the Internet overall – for students 13 and older to voice their views on the news.” You can read a much fuller explanation about the feature here.

EducoPark lets you write about a “life lesson” you learned and how you learned it, as well as begin an online discussion on challenges and how to face them. Users can leave comments on these lessons, and vote on which ones were most helpful. I didn’t see anything particularly inappropriate for the classroom in a quick review of the site, and it seemed pretty interesting. I think it might be a good place opportunity for students to share their own “life lessons” and comment on others.

“Word Is” lets users write down their own definitions of what words mean to them and then rate which ones they like best. Some of the definitions can be a bit esoteric, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a place for English Language Learners to study for vocabulary development (though I’m sure they would pick-up some useful info). However, it would be a nice place for students to write their own definitions.

All Voices is a news site that includes news from mainstream sources as well as contributions from registered users. It seems like they do a good job of collecting engaging stories, and the site itself is attractive. The reason I’m posting about it, though, is because I think it’s a good place for ELL’s to leave comments on current events. Unlike the comments section of most major news outlets, from what I can see, those who comment maintain a degree of civility.

At Site Jabber, users can write reviews of websites. It appears to be primarily aimed at online businesses, but there are lots of other websites reviewed, too. Students can write reviews of their favorite online sites, including (but not limited to) the ones we use for English learning.

This list filled with links to sites where students can write on the web and others can read their creations. Some of these links include news sites or others where they can leave comments on news content. Spotery is somewhat similar — users can leave comments on news stories from around the web. It differs, though, in one key way that makes it potentially especially engaging to students — users can add a link to the site to any other article about a topic that they are interested in. Then, they can leave a comment about that news item. Or, a teacher can choose a particular article that he/she wants students to comment on and, in addition to students comments, they can check to see what other people have said, too. Brikut is a similar site.

Explorra is a new travel site that appears to be designed to compete with the many others that allow you to create your own travel itinerary. I’ve posted many of those similar sites at The Best Sites Where Students Can Plan Virtual Trips. I wouldn’t add Explorra to that list, though — the others seem to do a better job at that.

However, Explorra does have one feature I really, really like — the ability for users to create an online guide to anyplace in the world. After sign-up, which only takes a minute, you identify a city, country or state, and then start listing what you think are the most interesting places there. Explorra will search the Web for images of each location, and you can write descriptions.

Music Explained is a new site where you can pick a song and write about what you think it means and how you feel about it. It could be a nice place for students to write about their favorite music and see what others have written, too. The link to student writing could be posted on a student or teacher blog/website. They indicate that there is some monitoring of what people write, but it’s unclear to what extent it is reviewed.

Mappy Friends is an easy place for students to write their reviews and impressions of places they have been — whether it’s cities or towns around the world where they have lived, or parks or attractions in the place where they live.

At Web of Fate, users can write predictions of events and explain their reasons why.

“My Immigration Story” is designed for immigrants to share their story in 200 words or less. It’s specifically designed to:

Let other Americans know how the current generation of immigrants is helping enrich this land of opportunity.

Baby Name Voyager is a fascinating data visualization tool that shows you the popularity of specific names during the last thirteen decades. You just type in a name, and an interactive chart appears seconds later. It’s really pretty interesting. But that’s not really why I’m writing about it. Even better, you click on a name and you’re given information about it, and offered the opportunity to write about it. Now, for students, this is pretty high-interest stuff — learn how popular your name has been over the past 130 years, learn about its historical roots, and write about your personal experience with it as your name. There are some caveats, though. It only shows the most popular 1000 names in a decade, and it appears (though I can’t be sure) to show only names in the United States. It seems to have a fairly large number of Latino names, but there are very few Asian ones. So it’s problematic for teachers in a school like mine (one-third Southeast Asian) to use the site.

Virtual Tourist is a new site that makes it easy for students (and anybody else) to write about places where they have lived or where they have traveled.

Tripline just opened for business, and it’s a great map-making application. You just list the various places you want to go in a journey, or a famous trip that has happened in history or literature, or a class field trip itinerary, and a embeddable map is created showing the trip where you can add written descriptions and photos. You can use your own photos or just search through Flickr. Plus, you can pick a soundtrack to go with it as it automatically plays through the travels.

Here are examples of the ride of Paul Revere and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

It’s super-easy to use, and the only tricky part is that you can’t add photos until after you create your trip and save it. That’s not a big deal, unless you couldn’t figure it out like me and had to contact the site.

I’d love to hear other suggestions.

There are a lot of other kinds of “products” students (videos, timelines, online tests, comic strips, etc.) can create for an “authentic audience”, and I’ll be creating another “The Best…” list sharing them (I’ve done this — The Best Places Where Students Can Create Online Learning/Teaching Objects For An “Authentic Audience”). In addition, I’ll be writing another list describing different ways teachers can connect with others who might be interested in developing “sister class” relationships to create and provide more authentic audiences (in addition to the other learning benefits gained).

As always, feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2009/04/01/the-best-places-where-students-can-write-for-an-authentic-audience/