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What it is: Inklewriter is a great digital tool that lets students (and teachers if you are so inclined) write and publish interactive stories. Inklewriter lets students create choose-your-own-adventure type stories, story lines can come with choices and then be linked back together. Inklewriter makes this process easier by keeping track of which story paths have been finished and which still need work. There is no set-up required, no programming language to learn and no diagrams. Inklewriter is free to use and easy to share with the world when it is published. When a story is finished, it can even be converted to Kindle format!

How to integrate Inklewriter into the classroom: Inklewriter is a great digital tool for creative writing. Students can explore multiple plot lines and what-if scenarios in their fictional writing. I also like the idea of using Inklewriter to ask kids to explore the "what-ifs" in history. What if we lost/won this war/battle? What if the other guy (or girl) had been elected president? What if the Berlin wall hadn't come down? These types of stories are fantastic opportunities for students to explore their curiosities and, in the process, learn more about the event they are exploring. After all, you have to know something about how an event actually went in order to write alternate endings. Inklewriter would be a fun way for students to come up with alternate endings to a novel they are reading. Our students wrote a variety of endings for The Giver. Each student wrote a different ending that picked up from the last chapter of the book. Inklewriter would have been a great tool to use for all of these endings to be available in one place. Students could copy/paste the last paragraph of the actual book and then offer their alternative endings as options. In science, students could use Inklewriter as a tool to record their hypothesis. Students can write out the objective and steps in their experiment and make a new "alternate ending" for their various hypothesis. In math, students could create story problems where they lead others down the path to discover the correct answer.

With a mix of vibrant images, visual annotation and text, the modules are designed by educators to engage students in information literacy and the research process. What constitutes credible information? How does source type contribute to relevance, authority and point of view? How do I evaluate and cite born-digital images and online sources? Over twenty full modules are available, addressing source and website evaluation, digital literacy skills, plagiarism prevention and ethical writing. There are three progressive levels to choose from (Starter, Junior and Advanced) for elementary through university students.

gClassFolders is a Google Drive script that will create folders for you for as many course sections as you need. The concept behind it is this; students have a "dropbox" folder in their Google Drive accounts that you have shared with them. To submit work students drag files into that "dropbox" folder. From there gClassFolders sorts submissions to the correct folder for each student. The latest version of gClassFolders is part of gClassHub which includes other useful scripts like Doctopus. This means that after your students have submitted their work through Google Drive you can grade it, write feedback, and have emails sent to students from one spreadsheet in your Google Drive account. Some other highlights of the latest version of gClassFolders include the option to add students to add students without having to re-create all of your folders and an option for moving students from one class to another without having to re-create folders. Applications for Education It does take a few tries to really understand using gClassFolders and Doctopus. Once you get the hang of it though it can save you a ton of time in the management of the files that students share with you. Visit the instructions page on gClassFolders for detailed directions on running gClassFolders.

place for students to publish reviews Not overly great writing in the reviews I looked at but might be good for sixth grade.

Expand your curriculum with our timesaving educational resources that use technology to improve instruction across all content areas and grade levels. Find current resources that align with standards, promote higher-order thinking, and support the development of writing skills. Monitor student research and writing, evaluate student performance, and create bilingual online lessons, classroom calendars, and quizzes in less time than traditional methods.

Our free Text Readability Consensus Calculator takes a sample of your writing and calculates the number of sentences, words, syllables, and characters in your sample. Our program takes the output of these numbers and plugs them into 7 popular readability formulas. These 7 readability formulas (see below) will help you find out the reading level and grade level of your materials and help you to determine if your audience can read your materials.

Bulb is a new service through which you can create, share, and browse through collections of educational materials. On Bulb you can create your own collections of text, images, and videos. You could create collections of materials about an academic topic or about a skill that you want to help others learn. As you create your collections on Bulb you can write text, upload or link to pictures, and upload or link to YouTube videos. All collections can be shared via email and through popular social networks like Twitter and Google+.

Place to publish student writing.

free service enabling quiz creation based on any images you own or that you find online. Students answer ImageQuiz questions by clicking on a portion of your chosen picture. For example, if you use an uploaded image of a map, you can design questions that require users to click on states, cities, or countries for their responses. Creating an ImageQuiz is easy. First give your quiz a title, upload a picture, then draw outlines around the portions of the picture that feature your answers. Write your questions and try out your quiz. Share the URL.

"Here be Fiction has been developed to support the discovery of fiction ebooks available from many of the same K-12 publishers that we are already working with for informational ebooks. These publishers have been producing high quality, award winning fiction books for years, but many school librarians are not familiar with the authors and titles. Here Be Fiction is working with the publishers to provide free access to selected ebooks to help school librarians discover the great fiction available right now. We need your help to read these books, write reviews, and discover the hidden gems. Some of our colleagues have already begun the exploration; Here be Fiction will help accelerate the efforts by creating a critical mass of readers and reviewers. The site will remain available throughout the year for anyone the explore the reviews. Registered users can create wishlists of books that look interesting. Participating publishers have agreed to the following terms: Publishers must provide either multi-user access or individual access with a discount for licensing multiple simultaneous readers so ebooks can be used for class novels, book clubs, reading groups, etc. Publishers must make ebooks must be available for offline access through a secure platform such as MackinVIA or a download using appropriate security to avoid digital divide issues and allow increased home access and reading in schools without wifi. Publishers must, when possible, allow the use of text-to-speech ability available through the reading platform to support struggling readers or those with special needs."

A great alternative to Picnik. You can do the basics - crop, rotate, sharpen, reshape and tweak the exposure & color. You can mess around with various special effects like soft focus, boost, cinerama, film grain, focal zoom and more. On photos with people, you can remove blemishes, white teeth, remove red-eye and lose weight. You can add text to your picture choosing from over 30 fonts. Finish your picture off with stickers, a picture frame and textures. This editing tool is user friendly and intuitive. It does not change the original on your computer, so if you don't like what you've created, then just start over. When you are finished, name your photo and save it to your computer.

PicMonkey is a free online photo editor that says Booyah! to whatever your creative heart desires. Basic editing all the way to advanced stuff like cloning, touch-up and eye-gasmic effects. Groovy overlays, textures, and frames. All the photo editing magic of Picnik, with 78% more monkey.

The Global Bookshelf is a book search and recommendation engine. The purpose of The Global Bookshelf is to help people find travel stories. The books you'll find aren't travel guides, they're travel stories that could inspire you to visit a new place and experience a new culture. You can browse The Global Bookshelf by region, genre, and book format (Kindle, PDF, physical book). Students can add their book reviews to The Global Bookshelf. If you have students who have read some travel narratives, consider having them write a review to share on The Global Bookshelf. This is a great way to provide an authentic audience for your students' work. The Global Bookshelf is good place for your students to find books that they may enjoy reading. Maybe they'll read a story that sets them off to explore the world.

. Silk is a free service for creating webpages organized around a theme or topic. Silk is intended to be a place where you can share collections of materials as well as write text directly into your webpages. Your Silk dashboard provides a place to organize your materials into collections and sub-collections. Your collections can include documents, videos, images, charts and graphs, and links to other sites. Take a look at a sample Silk site here. You can create multiple sites within your free Silk account. Your Silk sites can be public or private. Creating collections on your Silk site can become a collaborative activity by inviting others to be editors or administrators on a site.

designed by the creators of Easy Bib, guides students as they evaluate online resources. After students indicate their desired address kof the site to be evaluated, Research Ready opens the site and asks the user a series of questions concerning purpose, accuracy, authority, relevance, and currency.  If a student needs support determining the answer to  a question, he or she can consult the help guide.  After writing a final review, students may email or print the results. Students can access the evaluator for free.

Widbook is a platform designed to help people collaboratively create multimedia books. The service is part multimedia book authoring tool and part social network. Mashable called it "the YouTube of books." On Widbook you can create a digital book that contains text, images, and videos. Widbook is collaborative because you can invite others to make contributions to your books. To use Widbook you have to create a profile on the service. The books that you create become a part of your profile. If you allow it, other Widbook users can add content and or comments to your books. Likewise, you can search for others' books and make contributions to their books.

Otus is a free online learning environment that designed for use on iPads and Chromebooks. One of the features of Otus is the option to create quiz questions in which students have to annotate a document or image with the drawing tools in the app. You could create a quiz question based on a document that has math problems typed on it. Your students could then write on the document to submit their answers to the problems. Click here to read more about all of the features of Otus.