Writely=Google Docs! Everything leads back to google...

Chapter 4 discusses a topic that is near and dear to my heart: Writing. In skimming the book at the beginning of the semester, I noticed that they had devoted a chapter to writing and I automatically wanted to use for the chapter presentations that we do in this class. However, while reading it, I was surprised to see that most of the resources mentioned were ones that I had already heard of.
The first section discusses the planning aspect of writing, specifically "concept mapping" I have used inspiration many times before as a student and saw that it can be useful for planning for writing assignments that are not creative in nature. Semantica proved to be slightly more useful than inspiration only because it allows you to zoom in onto different parts of the concept map you create. Concept mapping is not all that new of a concept, so that section was mostly a review for me.
The discussion of presentation writing basically focused on the "dont's" of Power Point Presentation creating. Because this is chapter is supposed to be about the technologies that can support writing ( in this case, presentation writing) and not the actual content being written, this section was an appropriate. It discussed of the number one pitfall of what seems to be the most popular presentation tool of the moment (Powerpoint). The pitfall is that Powerpoint has many distracting tools within it.
I completely agree with this because I have made many Powerpoints that looked really neat but severely lacked content.
I loved the section that discussed students publishing their work online. It really does force kids to take their writing a little more seriously. Having a child's work published can provide a huge boost for their self esteem. I would have liked to see a few more resources for non-collaborative writing. Some students are very private and protective of their writing and I would like to offer them resources so that they can explore writing on their own time. The chapter offered us Poetry forge which was lacking in my opinion. Scholastic seemed more promising with all of its "writing workshops".
The last section was beneficial and interesting. I like the idea of collaborative writing because it benefits students in all of the ways that any cooperative project can while giving students a chance to hone their writing skills. My favorite resource was SWoRD, but that is not really suitable for young children. Writely was pretty neat... I typed it and reached google docs! Either I did it wrong or Google really is everywhere.