The best educational software allows teachers to teach skills they have always taught but to do so in a much more effective way. Thinklinkr is the first online Outlining application and it has great promise for teachers. The video below shows a movie of an outline being built up. It takes about 10 minutes to become familiar with the controls. It does a simple task well.
I suspect that outlining is not usually well taught, because it is a tedious task for the writer, is messy as one moves sections around on a piece of scrap paper and seems to get in the way with the actual writing. A very easy to use and clean interface like thinklinkr is very accessible (once you have a computer and an internet connection) and is fun to use. There are few bells and whistles: just simple text that can be exported into Word or whatever at the conclusion of the outlining process.
A big advantage of this tool over conventional outlining is that being online, it can very easily be a collaborative activity. Students can submit their outline to the teacher for comment, groups of students can work on an outline together from home.
The video demonstrates a very neat function of thinklinkr, that the old versions of the outline, the revisions, can be played as a movie, and one can scroll back and forth to see how the outline has evolved with each keystroke.
A tool like this allows and encourages more attention to learning an important skill.
If you are using Internet Explorer, just click on the button to download Chrome Frame it it will work fine. You can have a play with my outline here (but not edit it).
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