Friday, February 10, 2012

Lino It: Collaborative Brainstorming in a Simple Package

Today, I wanted to point out a great website and its app that serves as a great organization method for brainstorming.  Lino It is both a website and an app that you can use in conjunction with your mobile device that serves as a digital sticky board.

When you start a free account, you have the ability to create a new canvas. Each canvas is essentially a sticky board where you can edit settings to allow a group or anyone to post a sticky note to the canvas, leaving text, pictures, or content. 

Lino It has a lot of great applications.  One that I found for my classroom came in the form as a collaboration lesson in Language Arts.  The students used a Lino canvas to post stickies on a topic in order to gather ideas and write a paragraph on a topic.  The students were encouraged to post as many sentences about the topic as they could generate.  From there the group would arrange the stickies using iPads and collect ideas that the group thought would yield the most coherent paragraph with the best information.  This process took students from posting dozens of stickies to critically evaluating which stickies were the best options.  They then deleted and trimmed the selection until they had only a few sentences left.  In the end, the students had some fairly decent information  Here is a link to a canvas that students worked on citing the skill of working independently as a means to more efficiently complete assignments.  Check it out and see some of the ideas the group ended up with.

The uses for Lino It don't stop there though.  This is a great organizer for ideas, a visual reminder board, and a means of collecting related media for student use later.  I have even seen teachers create a canvas of all notes and tutorials they have on a specific topic, such as the order of operations in math. 

If you have used Lino It before and have any additional ideas, please feel free to list them here. 

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