Group items tagged

"MixedInk's collaborative writing platform allows groups of any size to weave their best ideas and language into a single text. "

Great use of Twitter as a tool to teach writing / literacy skills

That's right...you heard me! And it's one of my favorite activities all year long. Paper Blogs. I use them to introduce my seventh graders to the idea of blogging and, more importantly, commenting.

" PrimaryPad is a web-based word processor designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time. "

'Here we aim to give you solid tips on advice to improve your writing from a wide range of different Irish authors.

Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, scripts or poetry we hope that you will find articles here that guide and inspire you and take you a step closer to publication. If you have queries on a topic we haven't covered here, visit our forum where you can ask the experts or discuss your thoughts with other writers in your field.'

NCTE's definition of 21st Century Literacies

Teach your students to use their hand-held devices to capture and present news and personal stories.

Ficly is about creativity. When I was originally thinking about this idea, I was looking for something creative I could do for the last fifteen minutes of my lunch break before I jumped back into coding and writing documentation. I'd originally had an idea for a much larger site for serious fiction, but realized that most people don't have the time to write serious fiction. But, everyone can carve out fifteen minutes to either continue a story someone else has started, or start something of their own - something simple - two, maybe three paragraphs of a character, a plot or even just a place.
That's the premise. We impose a limit of 1,024 characters because we think constraints are good. They make you choose your words more carefully. They also make it less daunting than starting at a never-ending blank screen in a word processor. All you have to do is write one kilobyte of something - something fictional. That's all.

"Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers."

Students hear a generic tune, to which they add poetry/lyrics, and then sing their poem/song karaoke-style.

23 Interesting Ways to Support Writing in the Classroom

Yet another free "plagiarism detector."

IU12 Writing Wiki

Future Me is a neat service that lets you write an email to your future self and have it delivered to your email inbox at a time that you schedule. It's easy to use Future Me. To use Future Me just type your email, select the date you want it to be delivered on, and then enter your email address. You can choose to keep your letter private (default setting) or make your letter public (anonymously) and placed in the gallery of letters.

Applications for Education
It would be great to have students use Future Me at the beginning of a school year. Students could write about what they hope to learn that year, what they do or don't like about school, and goals that they have for themselves. Then at the end of the school year students can read their letters and see how they've changed over the year.

Chogger is a free comic strip creation tool offering a good selection of editing tools. Chogger allows you to draw images from scratch or use your existing images. You can even connect your webcam to Chogger to capture pictures for use in your comic strips. Once you've added images to your comic strip, you can add effects such as fading and outlining. Chogger also allows you to customize the look of each frame in your comic strip. Comic strips created in Chogger can have as few as three frames or as many as twelve or more frames.

Be Funky is a simple tool for turning digital photographs into digital comics. The image you see to the left is a cartoonized image of me based on a photograph I took with my webcam. Be Funky can be used for simple one frame images or be used to create an entire strip of cartoonized images with inserted text.

This is a great site! I like to use it to 'hide' student faces when using images of students online.

PikiKids provides a variety of layouts to which students can upload images then edit the images or add text bubbles and titles. The comics that students create can be embedded into a blog or website as well as be shared via email. PikiKids is free to use, but it is a for profit website as it offers options for buying tee-shirts or mugs with user-created comics.