Writing with Digital Tools
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of. ” – Joss Whedon
Get your copy of Hacking Digital Learning, The 30 Goals Challenge, or Learning to Go. Ask me about training your teachers, [email protected]!
Writing is personal. Each time we write we share ourselves. Our writings expose our ideas, thought-process, arguments, logic, inspiration, and words. As educators, we should handle each piece of writing with care as if it is a very personal gift our students are sharing with us and their peers. We can help our students feel more confident about themselves through their writing. Digital tools help us to improve our students’ writings. There are tools for quicker peer editing and feedback, apps to improve grammar, and sites filled with graphic organizers to help students learn the structure of various types of writings. Find various handouts and lesson ideas in my book, Learning to Go. Below, I have included the slides for my recent webinar, Teach Writing with Digital Tools. Keep scrolling to access the bookmarks.
Tips
- Google has various tools, apps, and features to improve our students’ writing. The presentation introduces you to several tips, such as using the Research tab under Tools in Google Docs to find scholarly resources and cite them! Find more Google resources here!
- Get them to check their grammar and spelling with tools like Grammarly and the Hemingway app. Rewordify is useful for translating difficult texts. Find more grammar resources here!
- Learn how to use extensions on your browser (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) to promote better writing. Students will learn so much about their writing process with Draftback (creates a video of their revisions and offers stats) and Read and Write (a must for English language learners and struggling writers with tons of features).
- Teach them the writing process with graphic organizers and interactives, such as Creately and ReadWriteThink. Find more sites for graphic organizers here.
- Show them how to be skillful digital researchers. Find more digital research resources here!
- Show them how to cite their resources with the Owl of Purdue APA guide, Cite This for Me, and the EasyBib app.
- Check out my Survival Tips for Digital Storytelling to discover tools for creating comics, digital books, and videos.
- Check out my resources, Blogging Tools and Tips. You’ll discover how to get your students an authentic audience through Quadblogging or Comments4Kids!
- Make it a ritual, teach the process, create a safe environment, integrate multimedia, use graphic organizers, give them an audience
- Skills to teach- digital research, citation and attribution, information literacy, and visual rhetoric and literacy
- Digital Writing Ideas- Comics, coding, digital storytelling, digital books, posters, digital portfolios, infographics, blogging, scrapbooks, ezines, and newspapers
- Writing Prompts- Makebeliefscomix.com 350+ printables and visual writing prompts, Writingprompts, and Photoprompts
- Emoji Writing Prompts- Find emoji writing activities here, ShellyTerrell.com/emoji. Try
- Byrdseed.com/emoji and Controlaltachieve.com/emoji-writing- prompts.html.
- Graphic organizers and interactives- Creately, Teach-nology, Edtechnut, Controlaltachieve, and ReadWriteThink (ex. Bit.ly/RWTCube)
- Digital Storytelling- Buncee, Book Creator, and Canva
- Word Clouds- Word Salad, Tagxedo, Wordart, Wordle, and Abcya
- Revision, Feedback and Edits- Kamihq, Grammarly, and Hemingwayapp
- Write for an audience- Studentchallenge.edublogs.org and Quadblogging.net
Bookmarks
Find the tools listed above and many more resources in the bookmarks below.