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My Carnigie's story maker is an excellent tool that can be used for teaching creative writing to your students. With this tool, students will be able to create a story in minutes, with animation if desired, and then share their story with somebody else or even create a print out.  My Carnigie Story Maker is extremely user friendly and students can get started within minutes and won't need much training to do so.  Students will be able to get their creative juices flowing as they practice their English Language skills and if you happen to be a Foreign Language teacher, this site would be great for your students as well.

A British website that has many free resources to download in PDF. Sometimes needs to be tweaked for American English, but a fantastic resource for literature, language, media resources.

VocabularySpellingCity provides the following sets of correlations to standards: U.S. Standards by State Common Core Standards for each States' Implementation Australian Standards by State Canadian Standards by Province English National Curriculum Standards

Content Area/Grade Level/Course Title/Activity Type: English/Language Arts/High School/Literature/Student Activity Topic/Lesson Name: Literacy Circle Book Report

Eleventh-grade English teacher, Lee Ann Spillane, describes how she uses Wordle to explore and analyze text patterns used by F. Scott Fitzgerald. How frequently does a word appear in the text? Students sit in table groups, with one computer per table. Using Google Books, students do a simple word search, creating a digital concordance.

30 New Media Tools and Web Sites for Writing Teachers. This article is really for adult learners but it offers loads of information and ideas for how best to incorporate technology into your lessons...everything from online learning to screen video capturing programs to online collaboration to web conferencing to video to animation creating tools...and it goes on and on! Worth looking at all the options.

"Kurt Wootton, co-author of A Reason to Read. "In my view, the repetition must not come before allowing students to participate in the creative tasks, but rather repeated practice walks side-by-side with the creative process."" I find this statement to "hit the nail on the head" as the debate between rote memory and creative "aha" moments continue. The analogy of the musician practicing for hours playing scales as well as note for note renditions of other's work is appropriate to this discussion. The book, "Outliers",by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses the 10,000 hour rule. To paraphrase; To become world class at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice. The author's examples range from Bill Gates to The Beatles. When two sides are set up as an US vs THEM debate, it misses the oppoprtunity to combine perfect practice with creative inspiration. Putting together a perfect meal is based on proper choices of various food combinations. Putting together a perfect learning environment is very similar in that a combination of repetitive learning and creative opportunity helps the learning as well as creative process.

"Kurt Wootton, co-author of A Reason to Read. "In my view, the repetition must not come before allowing students to participate in the creative tasks, but rather repeated practice walks side-by-side with the creative process."" I find this statement to "hit the nail on the head" as the debate between rote memory and creative "aha" moments continue. The analogy of the musician practicing for hours playing scales as well as note for note renditions of other's work is appropriate to this discussion. The book, "Outliers",by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses the 10,000 hour rule. To paraphrase; To become world class at anything, it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice. The author's examples range from Bill Gates to The Beatles. When two sides are set up as an US vs THEM debate, it misses the oppoprtunity to combine perfect practice with creative inspiration. Putting together a perfect meal is based on proper choices of various food combinations. Putting together a perfect learning environment is very similar in that a combination of repetitive learning and creative opportunity helps the learning as well as creative process.

The Storybird Ning webpage is a place for teachers to get together and brainstorm ideas and information relative to the implementation Storybird.com with their students. Storybird is a collaborative storywriting website that allow students to read, write, and share their creations. Students can illustrate their stories with images from the site's artwork library.

Having students express themselves with this tool allows them to be creative and have some fun too.

This article points out the significance and the approach to the digital writing in a dialogue style with Troy Hicks, an associate professor of English at Central Michigan University. He uses 'MAPS' heuristic -- mode (genre), media, audience, purpose, situation -- to help writers "intentionally" and "deliberately" think through composing digital texts. He also suggests teachers give themselves and students the opportunities and permission to play (and possibly fail) with the tools, as this can serve as a model of overcoming learning curves and digital writing process. This reminds me of the idea, 'dabble' with the tools, brought up by Jeff Utecht(2013).

Collection of Voicethreads related to writers

With CCSS upon us, this website is a great tool for students to work through informational texts, vocabulary and grammar online - at grade level. There are free samples to try out - then it seems you need to commit to purchasing. Very accessible and the free samples are worthwhile.

This article by John F. Bauer and Rebecca S. Anderson helps explain valuable criteria and sample rubrics for evaluating online classroom formal and informal discussions, explaining the rationale for different rubrics for each and providing sample of each.