On Sunday evening I published a post about a service called Future Me. Future Me lets you draft a letter to yourself to be sent at future time of your choosing. I think that using Future Me could be a good way to have students write a letter at the beginning of the school year about where they would like to be at the end of the school year. Then at the end of the school year they can receive the letter and reflect.
The problem with Future Me, as pointed out to me by Ms. Drasby, is that it has a public gallery of letters which you might not want elementary or middle school students to read. An alternative to using Future Me is to have students write blog posts then simply schedule them to appear at months later. Blogger, Kidblog, Edublogs, and every other popular blogging tool offers the option for scheduling blog posts.
If you don’t want to or can’t add your students to a classroom blog then simply have them write the letters to their future selves in Google Docs or Word. Collect the letters and then you can transfer the text into blog posts that you schedule to appear in the future. (If you want to move text from Word into a blog post make sure you copy the text into the HTML editor of blog platform rather than using the “compose” mode, click here for more information on that topic.).
