Fodey.com - Make your own newspaper

This site is a really nice one for encouraging your learners to write at home.  They can easily and for free create a newspaper story like the one below or little animations with wizards, squirrels, cats or ninjas - all good fun and very easy.  You don't have to sign up and when you have created your image, you can just download it and it's yours to do what you want with - how easy is that? 

Get them to write a story and send a copy to you by e-mail, or print them out and stick them up on the wall. 

Wallwisher

Another great site from Nick Peachy's blog.  It's free, it's quick to set up, you don't have to register and it's very interactive!    It's the internet equivalent of a big notice board that anyone can add content to.  This could be text, pics, video, links to websites, etc.  
There are all sorts of possibilities with a class - you could have a discussion topic in class and ask them to post their views so that they can all be viewed or you could get individuals to make a wall each over a period of time (maybe a month).  This could be on a particular theme, or could be an accumulation of ideas, language, texts that they like etc over that time. In this way, it acts just like a blog, but perhaps because it's so easy and intuitive to use, it might be seen as more of a do-able task to less 'techie' learners.

The only downside I can see is that it's potentially very public (but so is a blog...).  You can set it so that only the designer of the wall has access to it, or so that other peole can see it but not add to it, and you also have the option of 'vetting' all posts before they go on the wall, so hopefully this will be enough to ensure that you don't get anything nasty on there!

Here's my 'wall' - feel free to stick a comment on it!


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