Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

My StoryMaker is the perfect tool for younger students just learning about plot design and character development for short stories. Hosted by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, My StoryMaker walks students through the process of story creation using a variety of online tools.

My StoryMaker requires no login other than a first name. Kids choose a main character from a limited menu of possibilities, pick what they want that character to be doing (on a rescue mission? Finding love?) and then designate which secondary character is also involved in the story. These steps are laid out in a very basic, easy-to-use method. The story editor then launches and, in a nice touch, there is an audio tutorial matching up with the text tutorial on the next steps.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

The origins of words and phrases from the English Language gets a nice twist with Etymologic, a fun online quiz that can be difficult to master. The site consists of a series of questions with two to four possible answers, most of which seems plausible. You have to show an uncanny knowledge of English (or be incredibly lucky with your educated guesses) to get all the questions correct.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

At Interactives at Learner.org, you will find interactive activities in the content areas of math, science, language arts, history, and the arts. Within each activity there is a combination of text, animations, pictures, and interactive material. I used this one on the rock cycle with my students last year.

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BY JACKIE REGALES

I’m no fiction writer, but if I had created characters as legendary as Long John Silver or Mr. Hyde, I’d be pretty satisfied with myself. Of course, I would also be Robert Louis Stevenson, the namesake of robert-louis-stevenson.org, who wrote Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses, making me a prolific (and dead) Scotch poet, essayist, novelist, and composer of pieces for the flageolet. Now that you have learned what a flageolet is, consider yourself smarter than you were yesterday.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I often have to remind myself not to put all of my digital eggs in one basket. I think about this just about every time I open up Gmail, then check Google Reader before moving over to my Google Docs to write something. That’s a lot of Google in my life. If Google falls apart, so do I. So I am often on the lookout for sites that could supplement my Google-rich writing environment, either for my personal use or for school use. Crocodoc is an alternative to Google Docs that seems to have a lot of the same features, particularly around collaboration and storing of documents online that can be easily accessible from just about any computer.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

The “I Write Like” website is an interesting diversion that could lead to some interesting conversations around text analysis. And it is sort of fun to see which famous writer will pop up when your own piece of writing is put into its analysis engine.

“I Write Like” takes your text and looks for similarities to professional writers. When it has finished its comparison, the site gives you a “badge” that you can embed in other websites. When I inserted some text for an article I was writing around bullying and technology for a local newspaper, the site informed me that I was writing like Cory Doctorow. I haven’t ready quite enough of Cory Doctorow to know if this parallel writing style is true, but I did follow the link to Doctorow’s book site and began perusing some of his work.

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BY JACKIE REGALES

If your students are anything like mine, then they will always salivate (figuratively, I hope) at the chance to make something, whether on poster board or a program like Photostory. In today’s classrooms, though, whipping out scissors and glue sticks can seem a little old-fashioned. Enter Smilebox, which offers slide-show and scrapbook-creation options, as well as the ability to make invitations, collages and greeting cards. Fair warning: on some of these pages, music will begin playing automatically, and it’s exactly the kind of digitized music you think it is.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Scholastic may be out to sell books, but it has some pretty neat writing resources on its website that just might inspire the next generation of novelists. In particular, the Scholastic site has an area called “Writing with Writers” that might be of interest to teachers and students because it pulls back the veil on the writing process. With featured authors such as Jane Yolen, Virginia Hamilton, and Jack Prelutsky, Writing With Writers brings viewers into the world of composing and then urges young writers to do the same.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I’m not sure what to think of this new site called Paper Rater, which is a free web-based service designed to be a tool for writing. It’s an automated tool which analyzes a piece of writing along a set of criteria, including possible plagiarism, grammar and spelling, vocabulary choices, style and more. The site is pretty easy to use. You paste your text into the box, click the button and wait for a second or two before Paper Rater spits out its interpretation of your writing. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Several months ago, online writing collaboration tool EtherPad realized the dream of every 21st-century startup company — they got bought by Google. The search giant wanted to integrate EtherPad’s seamless multi-user collaboration into their much-ballyhooed Google Wave project. What they weren’t so interested in doing, however, was keeping EtherPad up and running, meaning that you can no longer create new documents at the EtherPad site.

If you’d planned a bunch of classroom writing activities based around EtherPad, fear not. Google has made the code base for EtherPad open source, meaning anybody can set up EtherPad on their own server for free. (more…)

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I am a bit of an oddity in that I enjoyed taking the SAT, ACT, and GRE a great deal. Perhaps I’m just wired for that kind of thing, or maybe I’m a bit of an educational sadist. For many people who aren’t me, though, these tests and the preparation they require causes a great deal of stress and anxiety. If you have students sporting a twitching eye and worn-out appearance due to preparing for a standardized test, perhaps it’s time they checked out VocabSushi.

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This article also appears on LEARN NC.

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Teaching, like writing, can be a very solitary experience. We close our doors and it is mostly just us, the teacher, alone with them, the students. We may be lucky to encounter a few interruptions during the day — perhaps a colleague is searching for a misplaced book, or another student has a message — but for the most part, teachers spend the bulk of the day alone.

Writers are often thrust into the same situation: alone with their thoughts, scribbling or typing away in a quiet workspace away from the noise. While there certainly is merit to the need for focus, there are many benefits to collaboration and connection with others as both teachers and as writers. And with the emergence of the Web 2.0 world, the physical space in which we teach and write can be extended, virtually, beyond the physical walls around us, allowing us to expand the reach of our professional learning communities. As a result, there are numerous opportunities for teachers to connect with their peers as writers.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Free association writing is one way to spark reluctant students who get bogged down in the process of needing to write exactly what the teacher expects them to write. This trepidation often stops young writers from even starting a piece. One Word is a website that might offer  interesting ways to get kids writing without worrying about being graded or even being read by anyone, if that is their wish. One Word gives you a single word — potato, for example — and provides you with a visual timer to write whatever comes to your mind in 60 seconds.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

If you watched the Super Bowl on television this year, you no doubt caught the Google commercial that told of a love story entirely through search queries. The ad, known as Parisian Love, was effective and I know I wondered — from a writing and teaching perspective — how it could be replicated. A complicated method of screencasting seemed to be the only thing I could think of, and that would be too cumbersome for most of us, including me. But Google has now made it simple to duplicate its efforts. The company launched a site called Google Search Story, which is an online digital story tool that allows users to create a shortened version of what we saw on the Parisian Love commercial.

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This article also appears on LEARN NC.

BY CINDY PHTHISIC

A class of second-graders sits and waves to themselves on screen as the teacher tests the web camera. The students know they’re about to make a video call using Skype. This is the first time they have ever heard about Skype, so they are not sure exactly what’s going to happen. For now, they are fascinated with just seeing themselves on screen.

While waiting for word on the other end, the teacher pulls up a Google Map to show the caller will be speaking to them from many miles away in Louisiana. A message flashes at the bottom of the screen indicating the caller is ready. Students go quiet as they hear their teacher place the call.

When a familiar face appears on screen, the students whisper, “I know him.” “He was at our school.” The caller is author Mike Artell, who had visited their school just a week earlier. The rambunctious group becomes still and silent. The students sit completely captivated.

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