1. Storyboarding a story /novel writing

2. EasyBib WriteSmart- Student Writing Guides

3. Prewriting Activities

4. Prepare an outline or diagram of your ideas.

5. Write your thesis statement.

6. Use this Flash guide from Read-Write-Think to set up your story and print out a plan.

7. Organizing & Summarizing

   These tools help students with the critical steps that come between research and writing.

   

   Grades   3 – 12  |  Student Interactive

Character Trading Cards This tool provides a fun and useful way to explore a character in a book or as a prewriting exercise when creating characters for original stories.

Writing & Publishing Prose

Whether your students are writing essays, stories, or letters, these online tools can help.

Grades   K – 12  |  Student Interactive

 8. ReadWriteThink Printing Press

The interactive Printing Press is designed to assist students in creating newspapers, brochures, flyers, and booklets.

 9. ThumbScribes is a platform for creating collaborative content. Co+Create haiku, poems, short stories, flash fiction, novellas, exquisite corpse and songs, real time or asynchronously with your computer, tablet, cell phone or even IM.

Research...?

Links:

My Study Bar - a comprehensive set of portable open source and freeware applications to support learners with literacy difficulties. MyStudyBar is similar to popular commercial programs which use a floating toolbar to support literacy. The main is MyStudyBa is free. The toolbar includes a range of tools to support inclusion such as mind mapping, screen masking, word prediction, talking dictionary, text-to-speech, Save as MP3 and voice recognition. PC Only. (Speech recognition only works in Vista or Windows 7) Watch the video of the My Study Bar features here. from http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/Writing+tools

Writing Tools

45 Essential Resources for Student Writers

Online Bookmarking and collaboration tool for research: Many tools allow you to collect, keep notes and share sites and information you find so that you can access them from home or school:

Organizing: diagrams, Charts, character mapping, timeline of events, etc.

See Organizing -> Links for a variety of tools.

Collaborative Brainstorming Tools:

1. MyNoteIT: This great tool allows students to take and store their notes online, edit them with the help of classmates, look up words or terms you don’t understand and keep track of things you need to do.
2. Google Docs: With this program from Google you can take notes online, save them, and even send them to your peers for collaboration.
3. Notely: Keep your class notes, to-do lists and more organized and easy to access with this site.
4. NoteMesh: This site allows students from the same class to share notes by creating a wiki, making it easy and practical to work together.
5. Stu.dicio.us: Here, students are able to actively organize their class materials, take and store notes, share information and even link to online reference sites.
6. ShortText: This is a very simple tool for taking notes online. Simply enter your text, hit save, and you’ve got an online note you can revisit anytime you like.
7. YourDraft: Take notes with this rich text editor and share and save them online.
8. Stickkit: Get an intelligent sticky note with this great online program. It looks at the text on your notes and can recognize important dates, bookmarks, emails and more, organizing them for you and making it easy to stay on top of everything.
9. SyncNotes: If you use a PDA this can be a great way to keep your notes accessible on both your main computer and your portable device.
10. JotCloud: If you’re the type that loves to put sticky notes all over everything then you’ll enjoy this online note taking tool. It allows you to create clouds of stickies anywhere you need them.
11. NoteCentric: Store and share your classroom notes with this innovative site. It keeps your notes organized so you can reference them later and you can easily access it through a Facebook account.

It's getting close to that time of year when teachers and students will be returning to school for the fall semester. The great thing about the start of a new school year is that it brings new resolutions for both teachers and students. If your students have the resolution to keep track of their assignments this year, here are some tools that could help them toward that goal.

 

42 Tasks is a free online task management tool. The appeal of 42 Tasks is the simple user interface that it features. After you have registered for an account on 42 Tasks, adding tasks to your calendar is a very simple process. To add tasks just type them into the blank description line in your dashboard then select a date from the calendar. Tasks are automatically arranged in chronological order. You can also place tasks within task categories that you've created.

 

Pegby is a good website for organizing the tasks that you and or your team need to get done. Pegby is set up like a corkboard with index cards stuck to it. The corkboard has three columns to place your index cards on. A column for things to do, a column for things in progress, and a column for things that are done. Each of index card can be assigned to a person, can have files attached to it, and can have due dates assigned to it. You can use Pegby as an individual or you can share your corkboard with others

 

Thought Boxes is a task management service with a hint of mind mapping in its user interface. At its most basic Thought Boxes is a place to create to-do lists. You can organize your to-do lists into groups that Thought Boxes refers to as "trains." Your lists can include basic text notes as well as links to other sites. The "trains" you create in Thought Boxes are basically categories for your to-do lists

 

Remind Post is a simple, free service for sending task reminders to anyone you choose including yourself. Here's how Remind Post works; enter the email address of the person who needs a reminder, enter the task he or she needs to do, select a completion date, then enter your email address. Remind Post sends a reminder on your behalf to the recipient who will confirm completion of the task. If the recipient doesn't confirm completion by the due, Remind Post will send reminders until the task is completed.

The task manager or "to-do list" feature in Gmail can be a handy mechanism for keeping track of the things you need to get done. The only problem with it is is you have to be in your Gmail account to see the list. Tekzilla offers a solution to that problem in the form of a Google Chrome extension called New Tab to Tasks. New Tab to Tasks opens your Gmail to-do list every time you open a new tab in Google Chrome. It's a little reminder of what you need to do before you open Facebook for the tenth time in eighteen minutes.

 

 

Soshiku is a free personal planner designed for high school and college students. Soshiku lets students organize their assignments by course, add assignments, and receive text message and or email reminders before each assignment is due. Students can add assignments to their calendars directly on the Soshiku website or via text message. Registering and getting started with Soshiku is quick and the user interface is very intuitive and easy to learn.

Remember the Milk is a free personal organization tool that works online, with mobile phones, and with iPads. Remember the Milk allows students to add assignment due dates to their to-do lists via text, email, or directly on their account homepage. A word of caution, while this services is free, students could incur a lot of charges from text and data communication on their mobile phones so be sure to discuss these options with parents before having students use the text/ data tools.

Here are a summary of a series of techniques from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Brainstorm Techniques