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Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way. The sharing features of Google Docs enable you and your students to decide exactly who can access and edit documents. You'll find that Google Docs helps promote group work and peer editing skills, and that it helps to fulfill the stated goal of The National Council of Teachers of English, which espouses writing as a process and encourages multiple revisions and peer editing. On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom.

Shmoop wants to help you become a better lover (of literature and history). See many sides to the argument. Find your writing groove. Understand how lit and history are relevant today. We want to show your brain a good time. Our mission: To make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age.

We've heard many ingenious ways that teachers have used Google Docs in the classroom. Here are just a few: * Promote group collaboration and creativity by having your students record their group projects together in a single doc. * Keep track of grades, attendance, or any other data you can think of using an easily accessible, always available spreadsheet. * Facilitate writing as a process by encouraging students to write in a document shared with you. You can check up on their work at any time, provide insight and help using the comments feature, and understand better each students strengths. * Create quizzes and tests using spreadsheets forms, your students' timestamped answers will arrive neatly ordered in a spreadsheet. * Encourage collaborative presentation skills by asking your students to work together on a shared presentation, then present it to the class. * Collaborate on a document with fellow teachers to help you all track the status and success of students you share. * Maintain, update and share lesson plans over time in a single document. * Track and organize cumulative project data in a single spreadsheet, accessible to any collaborator at any time.

Play me a story? Welcome to Playfic, the online community that lets you write, remix, share, and play interactive text-based games with the world.

Kids' Letters to President Obama Would you like to see your letter to President Barack Obama published in a book? If you are between the ages of 5 and 15, you can write a letter to President Obama that will be published in a book by Random House. The book is Kids' Letters to President Obama, edited by Bill Adler.

via EdTechWeekly Grammar Checking Plagiarism Checking Writing Suggestions

Good to remember with any mention of Bloom that these are stages before goals. Mastery in one necessitates the next. Bad teachers tend to shoot for the highest and overshoot the others. These are developmental stages that must be passed from one to the next.

"The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work-researching, writing, and publishing-of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database." Via http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/04/history-engine-explore-stories-of.html

These practice items provide examples of the new content and increased rigor represented by the revised Standards of Learning (SOL) and illustrate the new Technology-Enhanced Item types for the mathematics, reading, science, and writing SOL tests.  Technology-Enhanced Items (TEI) require students to indicate their responses in ways other than a multiple-choice format.

help writing smart goals

Communication skills are critical for today's students. Reading, writing and the ability to tell a story set the stage for success. The Hub, a new TV destination dedicated to bringing kids and families together, is partnering with Discovery Education to support teachers in this important endeavor. Here you'll find inspiration to engage and inspire your budding writers. Meet the artists, editors and writers that bring good stories to life-and watch your students' communication skills soar!

The hardest part of teaching movie making is making teachers and students realize that planning, scripting storyboarding make EVERYTHING go faster and easier.

Scripting This is the process of writing down on paper what the video is about. Is your piece a comedy? A Drama? Are you interviewing someone? Are you documenting an event? These questions and more are answered during the scripting process.

Here are five ideas that will help you begin building your own personal learning network. 1. Read blogs related to your passion. Search out topics of interest at http://blogsearch.google.com and see who shares those interests. 2. Participate. If you find bloggers out there who are writing interesting and relevant posts, share your reflections and experiences by commenting on their posts. 3. Use your real name. It's a requisite step to be Googled well. Be prudent, of course, about divulging any personal information that puts you at risk, and guide students in how they can do the same. 4. Start a Facebook page. Educators need to understand the potential of social networking for themselves. 5. Explore Twitter (http://twitter.com), a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to exchange short updates of 140 characters or fewer. It may not look like much at first glance, but with Twitter, the network can be at your fingertips.

Connect with educators who share your interests | Share lesson plans | Compare notes on resources and products | Discuss topics of mutual interest | Write a blog | Share files, images, and videos | Message and chat for instant dialogue | Create groups to build community and collaborate.

via http://freetech4teachers.blogspot.com/2008/12/secret-builders-virtual-world-for-ages.html SecretBuilders is a virtual world for children 5 to 14 years old powered by a web 2.0 community of children, parents, educators, writers, artists and game developers. On SecretBuilders, children will explore virtual lands, undertake quests, play games, maintain a home, nurture a pet, and interact with their friends. Three features which form the backdrop for SecretBuilders distinguish it from other online worlds: * Children learn through immersing themselves in the stories, themes, and concepts from the best in literature, arts and humanities. They will interact with famous historical and fictional figures and be introduced to content and characters from world civilization and the great thoughts and ideas of human creativity. * Children will create this site, not just consume it. They are directly involved in creating this world with their ideas, critiques and contributions on virtually every aspect of the site and many of their ideas will be implemented! * Children publish their works - writings, art, videos - making SecretBuilders their own personal store of creativity. They can invite friends and family to view their works, and comment upon them. Seeing their works published and enjoyed by others instills tremendous for self-confidence as well as motivation to do more.

A free text-to-speech plugin for Microsoft Word For people with reading and writing difficulties, having text reinforced by hearing it read aloud can be very useful.