"Girl Power: 15 Fictional Characters to Inspire Young Readers"

"Curriculet's digital reading platform allows teachers to enrich reading by embedding their questions, quizzes and rich media directly into the reading. Curriculet is FREE for both teachers and students. REAL-TIME FEEDBACK Gone are the days of waiting until exam time to gauge student comprehension and identify roadblocks. With Curriculet, students encounter checkpoints at a relevant moment for learning, and are given immediate feedback on their performance. TRACK COMMON CORE No other digital reading platform gives you the power to track and measure mastery of Common Core Literacy Standards across all subjects including Science, History, and Math. Simply connect your questions to any Common Core State Literacy Standard and immediately get data each night that measures student growth and mastery over time. READ ANYTIME, ANYWHERE. Curriculet isn't tied to just one type of device. Our browser-based product allows students to start their assignment in class on a laptop, pick up right where they left off and read more on their mobile device as they ride the bus home; and, finally, finish up on the family computer."

"ead With Me is a new mobile application that makes student reading fluency assessments easier to administer. The benefits of using Read With Me includes: a library of passages ready to use; fast and accurate calculations of words per minute read, number of errors; easy to share reports to parents, students, and staff involved in student's educational progress; and an all digital solution avoiding endless piles of photocopies."

"Figment is an online community where young adults and teens come together to create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Figment is also an innovative, exciting teaching tool, already being used in classrooms, libraries, and other educational settings around the country to inspire and engage young readers and writers. And what are Figment Groups? Figment offers two types of groups-public open groups for our general users to connect over anything from poetry writing to Bieber-mania; and private closed groups for our educator community. Private groups look very similar to the public groups, but with added benefits. You can limit membership to your class, library, or organizational community, and other Figment users can't see inside your group. Through these user-friendly, intuitive virtual writers' workshops: Students can create and revise writings in the safe space of a private group, sharing their works-in-progress, as well as commenting and reviewing, only with other members and their teacher. Teachers can post and update assignments, share links to relevant materials around the web, and monitor student writing. Using the group discussion tool, students and teachers can have class discussions, ask questions, and share outside resources. Once complete, students can publish their writings to the entire Figment community, therein taking advantage of one of the largest authentic audiences for student writing on the web."

Free on iTunes for IPhone, iPad, IPod Touch, and Mac

"Story Me is a free iPad app for turning your pictures into comic strips. Story Me provides more than a dozen layout options to which you can add pictures from your iPad's camera roll and or from your Facebook account. After importing pictures into a template you can apply cartoon effects to the pictures. To complete the creation process just tap on your imported pictures to add speech bubbles and captions. Your completed Story Me comics can be saved to your iPad's camera roll, emailed, printed, or shared on Twitter and Facebook. You do not need to create an account on Story Me in order to use it. Story Me is easy to use and because it doesn't require users to create an account it is a good choice for elementary school use. Pictures that students have taken with their iPads or found online can be good writing prompts. Importing those pictures into Story Me to create a comic strip could be a good way to get students interested in a creative writing assignment."