1. Logging in at Youth Voices takes you to the wall on your profile!
Now when you log in at Youth Voices, instead of opening the home page, you will be on your profile page where you can:
- scroll on a wall with a stream of your recent activity on the site (and in NowComment) and you can reconnect
- leave messages for other students on their walls
- compose a short update that might include an image, a video, a gif, a quote, an audio file, or a link.
Try it on your phone too!
And, don’t worry, as this video shows, you can always get back home with the home button and the Youth Voices icon at the top of all site pages.
This is a small change that suggests a bigger shift: a move to giving students more ways to ideate, to question, to express themselves, to communicate, and to collaborate — all on the platform of Youth Voices. See this celebratory post to learn more about the big picture of Youth Voices as we turn 20 years old.
2. How to set up a writer’s notebook on Youth Voices
Youth Voices Docs has a feature that will help you to organize a journal or a writer’s notebook right on the site.
- First create a cover Doc for your writer’s notebook and name it something like “Your Name’s Writer’s Notebook.” This will be a parent Doc.
- Next, when you write a journal entry, take a picture, make a video, or a rough draft or anything that you want in your notebook, all you have to do is go to the Parent tab at the bottom of any Doc and find “Your Name’s Writer’s Notebook” in the dropdown menu.
- Remember, with access controls, for each entry, you decide whether you want that Doc to remain public, or to be available to only other logged-in users, or to users in your school, or private to you and the teachers on Youth Voices.
Your parent document will be linked at the bottom of each journal entry and all of your journal entries will appear as links in the “children” section at the bottom of your parent document.
Here’s my example: Paul’s Writer’s Notebook.
With Write Out coming up October 9-23, 2022, let’s get ready for rambling field notes and nature journaling online by practicing with our computers and our phones. On Youth Voices, we can make:
- multimedia updates on our walls
- multimodal journal entries in Youth Voices Docs
Join us! We welcome new teachers and students to join our community!
Both Youth Voices and NowComment are free to you and your students. To sign them up all you have to do is to complete two columns on this data sheet. We just need their first names and their email addresses. Copy this data sheet and share it with allisonpr@gmail.com and I’ll get your students up and started within hours. I look forward to hearing from you!
Youth Voices is an open publishing and social networking platform for youth. The site is organized by teachers with support from the National Writing Project. Opinions expressed by writers are their own. See more About Youth Voices. Terms of Service. Privacy Policy.
