Strengthen your students writing skills

Let's write! Write, write, write. Have your students write. Write non-fiction, write creatively, write instructions, write sequences, write opinions, write feelings, write thoughts. Give your students a pen (or keyboard) and show them how powerful writing can be. Student writing is good, but there's a way to make their writing even better and strengthen those skills. The Hemingwayapp allows your students to enter their writing (sentence, phrase, paragraph) into the tool and find out some important information about their writing. The site will analyze for passive voice, complicated words, poor grammar, wordy sentences, run-ons, etc. It will also tell the student what their writing level is at. 
How to Use after you click on the link:

4 ways to have Students write for an Audience

Students should write a lot in school but too often, they are writing for an audience of ONE (the teacher). They are given a task of writing creatively or an essay on a topic or a story, their thoughts and ideas are amazing. They work hard, put forth great effort and complete their work. They are proud of it. They are excited about it. The "due date" comes and BAM! the student is hit with the realization that all that hard work will only be viewed and appreciated (or even worse, just skimmed) by one person: the teacher. We want, no-we need, to provide our students with a bigger audience. We want them to be heard! An audience of one does not produce a very high level of concern. But an audience of hundreds, if not thousands makes it real and gives the writing meaning.  Here are a few ways to create a large audience for your "authors" (students).

1. Create an ebook. Creating an ebook isn't as difficult or complicated as one might think. In fact, there is a tool that you can use that you are already familiar with--Google Slides. Yes, great for presentations, but it can also be used for creating an ebook, which can be downloaded and shared. Create a new google slides, change the dimensions of the slides to the standard 8.5" x 11." When finished, go to "File"--"download as"--and then click "as pdf." This is a great way to create a picture book. With the "sharing" feature of Google drive, collaboration is not only possible, but easy!

2. Google Docs: Writing a story via google docs makes it easy to turn into a "webpage" and share or post.

3. Widbook: Allow students to create a online/ebook with this site and get it added to the Widbook collection of other ebooks. This tool allows students to work collaboratively on the writing project.

4. Blogs: Tools like Blogger gives students a voice and an audience. In our world today, more than ever the youth want to be heard! So give them the opportunity to blog about: what they know, what they learned, what they think, what they feel, what they dream about, what they fear, what they want to know, what they wonder, and what they want. A blog gives them a voice to share and be heard.

Collaborative Writing Tool: Draftin.com

Writing is such a big deal. With Draftin.com, you can write and share it with colleagues or collaborators. Simply go to Draftin.com and sign up for a free account. Once in, you can create a new document and "share" it with anyone, which allows them to add/edit the document as well. Since you are the creator of the document, you must approve all changes to the document before they are put in place. You can share via link or email. You can create text documents or transcriptions (audio). 
Applications for Education: Writing using Draftin.com allows you to utilize a "cloud" writing tool. When students write in Draftin.com, they can share it with their partner and they can both work on it at home. Partner students up and have them work on a document together. This teaches good 21st century collaboration skills. Students can use Draftin.com to write a paper individually and turn it in via email. This allows them to always have their work with them, no forgetting a flash drive or losing their paper. 

Infographic: What if the World was only 100 people? (fascinating)

If the world only had 100 people, what would it look like? Breaking the world's population down to only 100 people gives us a MUCH clearer picture of what this world is like. This interesting inforgraphic was published by 100people.org 
Some highlights: Only 7 people would have a college degree. Only 5 people would be living in North America. 48 people would be living on less than $2 per day yet 75 of the 100 people would be cell phone users. Check out the infographic for me.  
Application for Education: This could be a great discussion starter, writing prompt, or a tool to have your kids practice analyzing or interpreting data from a graph.

If the World were 100 People infographic by KVSStudio.

13 Photos that Changed the World

While browsing the internet, I came across an interesting post from an author, Ransom Riggs, of one of my favorite books (Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children). He is not only a writer but also does a lot with photography. He compiled 13 photos that "changed the world." I think its fascinating to look at this list and just think about these pictures and the circumstances surrounding them. Whether you agree with the list or not, you can't argue that these pictures are very significant and bring about a lot of emotion. 
Application for Education: This list could be a great tool to get your students thinking and writing. Explain the circumstances of what this list is, and then show them a picture from the list. They can write about what they see, what it is, how they feel, etc, then discuss. Very thought provoking. 

Click Here to see the 13 photographs that Changed the World