Literacy
Real-time collaboration
Digital Citizenship resources
Copyright free images
Drawings for those who can't draw
Themes and templates
AutoDraw
A suite of tools from Curriculum Pathways (a site I’ve written about in one of my newsletters). It is absolutely FREE. These writing tools are designed to guide students through the stages of writing. See my March 2018 Newsletter to read more about Writing Navigator.
Word Tamer is an interesting site which has been around for a long time. It provides young writers (sometimes reluctant writers) a carnival like journey to learn about plots, characters and settings.
Amplify ELA is a blended curriculum designed specifically for grades 6–8. With Amplify ELA, students learn to tackle any complex text and make observations, grapple with interesting ideas, and find relevance for themselves.
Longmeadow Public Schools recently acquired a site license for NoodleTools, an online research management platform. Students evaluate information, build accurate citations, archive source material, take notes, outline topics, and prepare to write. Three differentiated levels support individual students across grades and abilities. The classroom environment allows librarians and teachers to provide feedback, monitor individual contributions to group work, and view statistics about source use.
Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. Poems you will find here are selected with high school students in mind.
Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, provided as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects.
Grammarly for Chrome will make sure your messages, documents, etc. are mistake-free. Adding Grammarly to Chrome means that your spelling and grammar will be vetted on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr, and nearly everywhere else you write on the web when using Chrome.
Available in free and paid versions, Grammarly checks up to 250 elements of grammar in your documents. It will point out punctuation issues, poor sentence structure and contextual spelling errors and even help build your vocabulary. Simply drag a file you would like to proofread into Grammarly
a fun and challenging game that tests your ability to match definitions to words. Knoword is played like this; you're presented with the first letter of a word, its part of speech, and the definition. You then have to fill in the correct spelling of the word. If you enter the correct word, you earn points. If you don't get it right, you lose points.
Pictures, slideshows, video, audio clips, documents and other primary sources. Awesome Stories hosts a collection of nonfiction "stories" with accompanying resources that cover a wide range of topics ranging from history and literature to science and art. Each "story" includes a narrative, primary sources, and links to videos, images, standards alignments, and learning tasks. Billed as a Common Core tool, it allows teachers to search by standard or find suggestions for assignments that are aligned to specific standards. Users can also easily search stories by collection, story origin, and media type. A free account gives users limited access to search stories and access teaching tools, while the paid Silver, Gold, and Platinum accounts include more valuable features such as visual vocabulary builders, audio narration, standards-based learning tasks, and tracking and grading tools.
Vocabulary.com offers hundreds of vocabulary practice lists and activities for students in elementary school through graduate school. In all there are more than 40,000 questions available through Vocabulary.com
Crosswords, puzzles, spelling tests, learning activities etc.
This is a great resource for Lit classrooms. The site provides videos of important aspects of the book such as Overview, Context, Plt, Characters, themes, motif, symbolism, and conclusion.
BibMe is a free automatic bibliography generator that supports MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian formatting. BibMe leverages databases provided by Amazon, FindArticles, Yahoo! News, and CiteULike to quickly and accurately AutoFill citation information for you. BibMe will then format the citation information according to the rules and guidelines of the style guides. If you prefer, you can enter your citation information manually. BibMe also contains a quick citation guide to show students the correct syntax for citing in various formats.
Inklewriter is a free tool designed to allow anyone to write and publish interactive stories. It’s perfect for writers who want to try out interactivity, but also for teachers and students looking to mix computer skills and creative writing.
Storybird is a free collaborative storytelling tool. It is aimed at allowing children to work with parents and friends in creating art inspired stories to share and save. Teachers can add students to their class securely and manage them. Users choose from art hosted on the site and build a story around those images that can then be shared with family and friends. Storybird encourages creativity and is a web tool that teaches skills necessary for working collaboratively. Storybird Studio is the collective name for the educator tools--administrative, creative, and social--and book-building formats that allow educators to use Storybird in a variety of ways with their students. Storybird Studio encompasses an Educator dashboard (which holds all educator tools to review student work/activity inside classes) and access to picture book, longform book, and poetry creation tools for teachers and their students. Click "Studio" from the upper navigation tab anywhere on the site when logged-in as an Educator, and you'll be taken to your Educator dashboard, which is home to your classes.
Here is a Storybird tutorial.
a neat multimedia writing platform for elementary school teachers and students. The appeal of WriteReader is found in the collaboration between students and teachers. Students can create multimedia books that teachers log into to correct. As is seen the video below, each page of a book has a space for students to write in and a space for teachers to write in. Teachers use the space on the page to correct spelling errors and or make editing suggestions.
At the Scholastic.com Writing With Writers Web site, students can e-mail their work to professional writers, who will comment on it. Guides students through different kinds of writing. Students work with authors, editors, and illustrators in workshops designed to guide them into developing their skills. There are teacher guides and related booklists.
Use clip art or upload your own images, then save to your bookshelf to read again later. MyStorybook.com is free to use. You can make unlimited number of stories, upload images, and share your stories for free. To support the site, they charge $5 for high quality printable PDFs of a storybook. After paying, you can still revise your story and reprint it as many times as you want.
A collection of fables (some with audio)
Simply take any photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice. Then share your Pix with friends and family as silly greetings, playful messages, creative cards, or even fancy book reports. And best of all, it’s FREE! AGES: 6-12. “ChatterPix Kids” does not collect any personal information or include sharing features.
Pictures, slideshows, video, audio clips, documents and other primary sources
VoiceThread (Choose K-12)
This is a paid site (as a secure site) but is excellent for all subject areas. Ed.VoiceThread is a web-based communications network for K-12 students and educators. Simple, powerful and safe, Ed.VoiceThread is a place for creating and collaborating on digital stories and documentaries, practicing and documenting language skills, exploring geography and culture, solving math problems, or simply finding and honing student voices
Persuasion Map from ReadWriteThink
Developing persuasive writing skills is a process that students start in elementary school and continue to develop through high school and beyond. Read Write Think offers a good interactive guide that can help students craft a good persuasive essay. The Persuasion Map asks students to start with a thesis statement before walking them through developing support for that thesis. Students can print their persuasion maps or email them to you.
ReadWriteThink is an online resource that contains lessons, interactive activities, printables, and an app to help kids improve their reading and writing skills. ... Interactives can also be saved in case it takes a student more than one class period to finish.
Comments or Questions? Email me at sbudreau@longmeadow.k12.ma.us