By Karen Schweitzer

 

The web is a great resource for writing teachers who need lesson plans, writing prompts, interactive activities, high-tech tools, and other free teaching materials. Here are 25 sites that would be particularly useful to educators who teach writing.

 

Karen Schweitzer is an education writer, editor, and author. She has written eight books for middle school students and is in the process of writing her first fiction novel. Karen serves as the About.com Guide to Business School, a site that offers guidance to prospective, current, and former business school students. She also writes regularly for OnlineColleges.net, a site that provides information about accredited online colleges.

 

 

Purdue's OWL - Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides more than 200 resources that can be used to teach writing.

 

Writing Fix - The Writing Fix is a very useful resource for writing teachers. The site offers lesson plans, writing prompts, and other classroom materials.

 

The Teaching Portal - The Teaching Portal is unique resource for classroom teachers who want to introduce their students to the art of story writing. Site features include writing exercises, worksheets, and lesson plans.

 

TeAchnology - TeAchnology provides access to many different writing resources, including lesson plans, workbooks, worksheets, story starters, and writing rubrics.

 

Thinkfinity - Thinkfinity is a Verizon Foundation Initiative that provides high quality teaching content for educators. The site offers interactive activities, original lesson plans, and a lesson search engine that pulls results from other respected sites around the web.

 

ReadWriteThink- This International Reading Association (IRA) website is an excellent place to find free teaching resources for the classroom. The site offers lesson plans, information on IRA and NCTE standards, a web resource gallery, and a student materials index.

 

Writing Den - Designed for grade six to grade twelve students, the Writing Den offers resources to improve vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing skills. The site also provides a section to help teachers incorporate Writing Den materials into the curriculum.

 

We The Teachers - This online community for teachers is a great place to find teaching ideas and lesson plans for the writing classroom. The site allows teachers to connect with other educators and share lesson plans online.

 

Shmoop - Shmoop is fun, new site with literature guides, poetry guides, and other teacher resources.

 

PoetryTeachers.com - This Meadowbrook Press website is a favorite among poetry teachers. The site offers tips on teaching poetry, free poetry activities, and other useful materials.

 

Grammar Girl - The weekly Grammar Girl podcast is short enough to play in the classroom and entertaining enough to engage students. Each episode includes quick tips for better writing and an answer to a weekly question.

 

Online Grammar Handbook - This online handbook from the University of Minnesota offers 21 chapters of links to punctuation and grammar resources. The handbook also includes writing instruction and other materials that would be useful to teachers.

 

Chomp Chomp - Chomp Chomp is a fun grammar site with definitions to common grammar terms, interactive exercises, teacher handouts, and classroom presentations.

 

VerbaLearn - VerbaLearn is a fantastic resource for teachers who want to improve their students' vocabulary. The site offers customizable lessons, learning activities, and more.

 

ThinkFold - ThinkFold offers a structured online environment for writing classes or writing partners to collaborate online. Workgroups can upload documents, interact with a share outline, and see changes being made in real time.

 

Mindmeister - Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool that can be used to help writing students visualize their ideas.

 

Scholastic Story Starter - This free online story starter from Scholastic generates fun story ideas for K-6 writers. An example starter: Write a brief biography of a thousand year old vampire who rides a giant sloth to work.

 

The Story Starter - The Story Starter offers nearly 400,000,000 creative writing prompts and story ideas for writing teachers and students.

 

Creative Writing Prompts - This site provides more than 300 creative writing prompts and journaling ideas.

 

Writewith - Originally developed by two college newspaper editors who lived on opposite sides of the country, this free web-based app can be used to write and collaborate online.

 

Scriblink - Scriblink is a free online whiteboard that can be used by students and teachers who want to collaborate on a writing project. The board is entirely private and only open to people who are invited.

 

Twitter - Twitter can be used for a lot of different things, but is especially good for classrooms who want to collaborate together on a story or poem. Each student can post 140 characters at a time until the piece is finished.

 

FanStory - Founded in 2000, FanStory is an online writing community that welcomes posts from writers of all ages. Community members can participate in contests and challenge one another to write on different topics.

 

NaNoWriMo Every November, NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) challenges writers to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days time. Teachers who want to challenge their older students can point to this site and encourage everyone to get involved.

 

The Online Books Page - Getting students to read good books is sometimes the best way to begin teaching writing. The Online Books Page offers more than 30,000 classic books that can be read for free online.

 

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How is Web 2.0 changing the way we write? And how can it change the way we teach writing?

We recently ran into a very interesting free website, MixedInk , that can be used for a collaborative approach to writing in the classroom. Here is a guest blog posting by the founder of MixedInk, Vanessa Scanfield.

Collaborative Writing in the 21st Century Classroom, by Vanessa Scanfield, CEO, MixedInk.

Advances in technology are provoking broad structural shifts in business, media, and government. These new technologies are enabling (and, in some cases, forcing) organizations and individuals to adjust in order to capitalize on new opportunities. Success now hinges upon an organization’s capacity to take advantage of a distributed workforce, employ democratic decision-making, and harness collaborative relationships.

Schools are reacting by incorporating 21^st century skills into the classroom. While the term itself is a bit vague, the overarching concept is that students should be moving beyond traditional curricular elements, delving into civic engagement projects, honing their critical thinking and collaboration skills, harnessing technology to produce better work products, and demonstrating the cultural awareness and leadership needed to succeed in college and beyond.

Teachers today have adopted a range of innovative tools to meet these demands.

• Classroom blogs, like Extreme Biology, supplement class discussion and highlight student work;

• wikis, such as Anatowiki, enable students to build a collective knowledge base;

• social networks, such as the Flat Classroom Project, connect students across classrooms, schools, and even countries;

• podcasts can make challenging class projects; and

• Twitter enables real-time participation and provides a new, creative outlet for writing.

These tools offer engaging learning solutions that reimagine the classroom as a place where students provide valuable contributions and learn from interacting with one another, rather than a space built simply for the one-way transfer of information.

I co-founded a startup, MixedInk, which helps to build a range of 21^st century skills across the curriculum. We offer a free, online collaborative writing platform that enables students to weave their ideas and language into a single text.

To use MixedInk, a teacher first sets up a project for the class to collaborate on a collective text. Over a period ranging from days to weeks, students write original versions of the text, edit others’ work, and weave different versions together to form new ones. Throughout the process, students comment on submissions and rate different versions to bring the best-written, most popular ideas to the top. In the end, the class can explore the strengths and weaknesses of the top collective text(s).

This demo video provides a helpful overview:

 

MixedInk Demo from MixedInk on Vimeo.

Simply by participating in a MixedInk project, students are exposed to a wide range of their peers' work. As they remix the best parts of various essays, students are challenged to critically evaluate the quality of what they read. When students rate and comment on submissions, they must analyze why they prefer some texts and not others. Perhaps most importantly, students hone their ability to recognize compelling concepts and their capacity to synthesize these ideas seamlessly into a single text. Those of us who have worked in groups to write grants, press releases, marketing materials, and mission statements know well the lasting value of this particular skill.

In January, Slate Magazine invited its readers to produce a collective inaugural address using MixedInk. In addition to borrowing language from other contributors, those who participated were able to borrow from the inaugural addresses of all the previous presidents. More than 400 people, including many students, collaborated to produce an eloquent speech, which was published at Slate.com on inauguration day. Though originally intended for an adult audience, the project offered a unique learning experience for the classrooms that participated.

Educational tools like MixedInk are built to nurture students’ creativity, harness their enthusiasm, and ensure their readiness to succeed in an increasingly digital world. In the comments, let us know which new media tools you have incorporated successfully, how you have used collaborative writing in the classroom, and suggestions for how to incorporate collaborative writing across different subjects.