Thinking and Writing

No need to sharpen that pencil!

There are many online tools designed to help people record and produce ideas.

Google Apps for Education

Google Docs, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and Drawing all lend themselves to various elements of thinking and writing. Click here for our workshop, Unleash Google Docs in the Classroom.

Mind Mapping

Graphic organizers, charts, wireframes, storyboards etc. Use for individual organization or collaborative pre-writing. Most can be shared and some charge after three creations.

Lucid Chart / Coggle / Text 2 Mindmap

Word Clouds

Paste your text (essay) into one of the following programs. It will create visual representation of the text used. The most prominent words, those used most often, will be larger than those used less frequently.

Tagul / Tagxedo

Traditional & Creative Writing with New Tools

Penzu

An online journal / diary that has an appearance of "real"paper. Keep private or share with the world. Autosaves and allows for uploading of photos (flickr direct).

Lucid Press

A publishing tool that provides the ability to create dynamic print and digital documents. Connects to Google Accounts. If you would like to go beyond a Google Doc, Lucid Press is the next step.

ReadWriteThink Printing Press

Easily create an online newspaper.

my ebook

Electronically publish your documents or books. Free and easy!

Inkelwriter

Create interactive, branching stories. Note - This tool requires intermediate technology skills.

Web Tools Presentation in Inklewriter

Boomwriter

Collaborative book writing with professionals, teachers or other learners. Story starters are provided, then writer produces second chapter. Competition is created by allowing participants to vote on the best second chapter then move on to the third chapter (and so on). A book is published in the end.

Collaborative Writing

Meeting Words - Simple, collaborative text editor

Google Docs

6 Powerful Google Docs Features to Support the Collaborative Writing Process

Extra

Google Books Ngram Viewer (info) | Google Books Ngram Viewer Search (try it)