I observed a class taught by Holly Hayes today, and she introduced me to some freeware tools hosted by NCTE at the ReadWriteThink website. I’m almost embarrassed that I had never seen these tools before, and I’m grateful to Holly for cluing me in! They’re specifically marketed toward K-12 teachers, but several of the tools provide great invention spaces for students in a web-based format that doesn’t require a special account or downloading anything at all. My favorite apps were a couple of mind-mapping applications that could help students generate and/or organize ideas as they write. The tools are fairly simple–they’re not designed for those that want to customize apps for their own use–but they have a wonderful plug-and-play quality that makes them useful for a quick activity in a writing class with virtually no learning curve. Great stuff!

I have to admit, though…I did get distracted playing a word find game based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Right now I feel like I spend an awful lot of my time learning to use technologies instead of having them save me the time I think they will because of how efficient I’ll (eventually?) become.

I don’t think I can say it any better than Alan Levine did, so I’ll point you to his blog. Now THAT saves me time.