What it is: The name Edistorm is a mash-up of the name Thomas Edison and brainstorm, it is inspired by Edison’s idea factories. Edistorm is an incredible brainstorming and collaboration tool that, on the surface, reminds me of Wallwisher. Edistorm has some additional features and abilities that make it very useful in the classroom. Just like Wallwisher, you brainstorm and collaborate using virtual sticky notes. Edistorm gives you a place to organize ideas in a real-time interactive wall. Virtual sticky notes can teach have their own color and can be organized in vertical or horizontal groupings. Edistorms can be created independently or with others in a collaborative effort. Edistorm features an idea bot that works at the bottom of the screen offering suggested ideas based on what students add to the sticky notes in the work space. There are a variety of bots including a rhyming bot, thesaurus, and related words. Public and solo Edistorms are free to create, premium accounts are available for private Edistorms.
How to integrate Edistorm into the classroom: Edistorm offers an exceptional opportunity for students to brainstorm, collaborate, and group ideas. Students can use Edistorm to brainstorm ideas for writing, research, for grouping ideas, and collaborating on group projects. Create an Edistorm for your students and ask them to group like ideas, sort, and expand on thoughts. This could be done for any historical event, literature, science concept, and even phonics. Students could practice spelling by typing out their spelling words along with a sentence or synonyms on sticky notes. Then, they can group words by spelling pattern or common phoneme blends. Create an Edistorm of sticky notes with English words and sticky notes with a foreign language word on them. Students can work together to group words with their meanings. In math, create Edistorms with word problems on one color of sticky note and answers on another set of sticky notes. Students can work to create groups of problems and their solutions. Edistorm can be used for whole class activities using an interactive whiteboard, the class can brainstorm together and collect ideas or use the grouping feature in an activity created by the teacher or students.
Tips: Edistorm requires an email address for sign up. If you teach younger students, you may want to create classroom Edistorm sessions that you have control over.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Edistorm in your classroom.
Sounds really great as I do love Wallwisher and the extra features enhance what Wallwisher already does.
I’ve been working on a blog, and a Twitter site, that are dedicated to helping my students with their exam revision, both for their English Literature classes and also for their pedagogically oriented Bachelor of Education modules. So far the Twitter account has been the easier to manage given the large amount of information and pedagogically oriented Tweets that are shared daily. However, in the next few months I’d like to focus on the blog. Anyway… I’m wandering. I simply wanted to use this comment to ask if you had encountered any open source applications that deal with:
1. literary studies;
2. storytelling;
3. writing or composition skills?
Hi Raymond, I don’t know of an OpenSource app that does all of that, anyone else want to weigh in?
Oooh. This sounds like a great find. I am going to have to take a look. Thanks for sharing