I am an English teach for middle school aged students at Fairfield Center School.  I began using Google docs with students several years ago.  It was a good beginning. Students wrote, saved, and shared their work. It wasn't perfect though.  I wanted to look elsewhere because I was frustrated that students were able to "resolve" commented feed back (whether or not they actually resolved the issue mentioned) and I saw no way to follow the development of their writing as a result of their deleting/resolving comments (especially from me which I would have used directly for a grade).  So, I embarked on a quest to look for technology tools to help teach writing. 


 Last year I experimented in the classroom, using Young Writers Project (YWP) http://fairfield11.ywpschools.net/  for more and more work from the kids, which is a web page just for kids to share their work and give feedback with the goal of supporting writing and thinking skills.  I also tried edmodo http://www.edmodo.com/ , which makes it easy to embed online resources or documents for students to access from where ever they have internet.  Edmodo also has lively chats around subject area teaching and using edmodo effectively by other users.  


This year I will continue from where I left off but make more effective use of programs, such as Google Tools or YWP.  This year I hope to make my students' work more visible so their work is shown off more and also so they recognize that they do have an audience.  This will include having students seek to get their work published, such as in the newspaper Young Writer's Project page.   Further, I hope to make it possible for students and parents to have a portal into what is happening in the classroom.  This should help with the communications piece between school and home.