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The Write-n-ator highlights words and vocabulary through fun videos and writing challenges starring the PBS character Word Girl.  Offer these challenges to your students as a class using a projector or interactive whiteboard.  Watch the video clip and create a class response to add to the challenge.  Alternately, each student can take the challenge in a writing journal.  These videos and challenges make for a fun introductory activity to use as a writing warm up.  They have the added benefit of introducing new words and vocabulary.

Comic Creator in the classroom: The Boy's Life Comic Creator is a great little tool to help your boys connect with writing and story telling in a way that they enjoy and understand. The tool is simple enough to use as a writing station/center on classroom computers. The comic does need to be created in one sitting, there is no way to save and come back to a comic later. Completed comics can be printed off and shared. The Comic Creator is a great entry point into writing but could also be useful in math for creating and solving story problems. Students can create a short math comic strip that can be traded with other students to solve. Students taking a foreign language class could practice new words by creating a comic strip story in Comic Creator. Use Comic Creator the first week of school as a way for boys to tell all about themselves. Each student can create a comic strip that stars them as the main character. Invite other students to try to match the comic strip with the student as a fun interactive bulletin board activity (Think comics on one side, student pictures on the other and string to draw the "line" between matches).

A plethora of writing prompts.

1) How does using the confined space of Twitter help your writing?2) What kinds of things do you think about when you use Twitter?3) Are there any other things that you would like to use Twitter for?4) Has using Twitter made you a better writer in other areas when using a pencil and paper? Computer?

Comic Master could be a good tool for getting reluctant writers writing. The organization that sponsors Comic Master offers teachers a set of lesson plans built upon the use of Comic Master in the classroom. The lesson plans are designed for students between eleven and fourteen years of age.

A comparison of Skydrive and iCloud side by side. There's Google apps, Skydrive, and iCloud as the big three of online cloud-based word processing and since we do so much writing in schools, it is likely that your school would select one of the three. If you haven't selected any, then you have a big problem unless you've got a masterful way of syncing locally. This is how we work in the 21st century and it is time to get with the program. Microsoft gives all SkyDrive users 25GB of free storage space. That's a whole lot of bang for absolutely no bucks.

Scholastic's Share What You Read service is very easy for students to use and for teachers to incorporate into the classroom. The advantage of using the Scholastic service over a creating a wiki for the class is that the Scholastic service saves teachers time. The Scholastic service does not require users to create an account prior to writing a review. In fact, the only information they ever ask for is the student's first name, grade, and state.

Visions on Earth is one of those resources that I'd be inclined to let students just browse through and let their imaginations wander. Ask your students to pick out some favorite photographs and write out some questions that the pictures prompt in their minds. Then have students try to find those answers online or in books.

Making a comic is a wonderful way to involve children in some creativity and storytelling. Although writing is limited in the actual online comic maker, kids can still use it as a spark for a story of their own. They could handwrite or type a story, and use printed cartoons from Pharaoh's Quest as their illustrations. Younger kids will relish the opportunity to make stories that revolve around their toys. Play with literacy even more, and work out children's names according to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Alphabet.

Looking for ways to combine digital literacy skills, research, literary study, reading and writing for the web, and more? All you need is Google Lit Trips! This one tool can provide cross-curricular connections, literary exploration, and 21st century literacy skills. It's simple. Literary Maps + Google Earth = a great classroom resource!

Snappy Words could be a good resource for students that are stuck in the rut of using the same words and phrases repeatedly in their writing. Snappy Words will give those students access to alternative words and their definitions much faster than thumbing through a thesaurus.

to integrate History Buff into the classroom: History Buff is a website that can help history come to life through story, virtual tours, audio and primary source news papers. I suspect that most students fall into the judge-a-site-by-it's-cover category like me. For this reason, if I was using it in my classroom, I wouldn't send students directly to the website to do a lot of digging on their own. Instead, I might direct them to the portion of the site I knew we would be using through a classroom website, wiki, blog or use a Weblist or Symbaloo to link to them. It is amazing how changing something as small as the entry point into a site can change a students attitude about the site (heck, I'm like that too!). Once I got into History Buff, I really appreciated the connection to primary sources and the way that the "actual" newspapers bring history to life. I REALLY liked the hoaxes in news section and suspect that students will get a kick out of it to. Your kids will be asking, how can people be SO gullible? These kinds of stories are wonderful discussion starters and will make students think critically about their own news media. As a fun extension, have your students write their own hoax news stories. Okay, now for demystifying the navigation of this site. See the itty bitty brown words in the left sidebar that are all squished together? That is the navigation. For real. I didn't notice it at first either! Go ahead and click on one to test it out…not so bad when you know what you are looking for, right? Right. For your convenience, I'm linking to each page of the site below so you can easily find what you are looking for. :) Online Newspaper Archives Historic Panoramas Reference Libraries (audio resources, hoaxes) Primary Source Material State Facts Interactive Quizzes Tips: History Buff has a newsletter you can subscribe to if you are, you know, a history buff. Just enter your email in that box under the header and clic