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By Adam Dachis
"OS X: There are numerous distractions on your computer and none of them make it easy to write. Like many distraction-free writing apps, Grandview takes over the entire screen to block them all out. The difference is that in addition to being able to see all the text you write, it can also show you one word at a time so you're simply writing in free-form and not worrying about anything you said before." 
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Here's an article on how to create a Wikipedia article, from, where else...Wikipedia.
Writing an article for Wikipedia is a great experience for students; it gives them experience in research, writing for an audience, understanding why citation is important, and in most cases, a great deal of motivation to do an excellent job (becuase their work will be public).
I think some students may find these guidelines a bit intimidating, so my might want to summarize them rather than have students read them directly. You be the judge of that. -JL
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By Kevin Whipps
"The idea behind Simplenote is, well, simple: give users a quick way to jot something down, then sync it across every platform, everywhere. To do this, you can use the web app, a variety of different desktop apps for your Mac including Notational Velocity and nvALT, or the iOS app which works on both your iPhone and iPad.
"What makes Simplenote so awesome is the Simperium syncing service. This allows users to quickly transfer data across multiple machines, and it’s at the core of the Simplenote system. When I say it’s fast, I mean it’s fast. While typing this very sentence, I had Simplenote running on the web in the background. By the time I finished this next sentence, the previous one was already on the web — as was most of this one."
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By Richard Byrne - Free Technology for Teachers
"Zopler is an interesting free service for collaboratively writing stories. The basic idea behind Zopler is to enable the creation of community-crafted stories. Here's how it works; as a member of Zopler you can start a story with as little as one sentence or as much as 1000 words. Your story starter can include images too. Then you can make your story starter public or private. If you make it public, any Zopler member can add to it. If you make it private, only those people that you approve can add to your story. Contributions to stories can be voted up or down by other contributors to the same story."
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From the website
"This fall, students will read and respond to the YES! article, “Living Large in a Tiny House,” by Dee Williams. Dee’s story is about why she chose to move from her 3-bedroom bungalow to an 84-square-foot house—a place where she keeps no more than 300 items and has never been happier.
"Your students should write an essay of up to 700 words answering the question, “If you had the choice, what size house would you live in? What are important features your house would have, and what would you intentionally avoid?”
"The deadline for registration is October 19, 2012. Essays must be submitted no later than November 21, 2012"
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From the website
"Contrary to popular belief tablets can be quite capable tools for writers. Whether used with an external keyboard or by tapping on the onscreen keys, with the right apps the writer can work when the muse dictates with the iPad using these 10 apps." Via Jon Samuelson, Jim Lerman
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Ian Klein: "At a recent conference on transmedia, or multiplatform storytelling, Starlight Runner Entertainment CEO Jeff Gomez said that stories help us commune with things greater than ourselves." Via siobhan-o-flynn, The Digital Rocking Chair, Lynnette Van Dyke, Paul Rawlinson
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A great collection of minlessons - Greg McVerry
"My beliefs about writing, stem from the books that I have read about emergent writers. Visit the F.A.Q. section of my web site for answers to common questions that I have received about my approach to Writer's Workshop. The lessons on this page reflect the lessons that I've used with Kindergarteners and First Graders. They are presented in no particular order. If you wish to see the progression of minilessons from last year (2008-2009), check out my Planning Guides page. Each year is different, and I change things up based on student needs. Therefore, the order of lessons is not what counts, but rather if I am I delivering lessons my students need, prompting them to grow as writers." - Mrs. Meacham
Excellent collection of resources and lessons for K-1 writing. -JL Via Greg McVerry, Karen LaBonte
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The intentions of this website are: To motivate me to learn and apply the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), particularly in my teaching of high school English and World History.
The goals of this website are:
This website is NOT: Via Karen LaBonte
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Free download from National Council of Teachers of English.
"This NCTE Policy Research Brief offers updates on research with implications for policy decisions that affect the teaching and learning of writing."
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Description from Internet Scout Project
"Spotflux uses the power of the cloud "to conduct millions of real-time checks for invasive tracking, advertisements, malware, and other bugs that pose a threat to your identity or your data." The application helps scan and protect users' connections from malware and other viruses, along with concealing the identity and location of users' devices. This version is compatible with all operating systems."
After last week's epically disastrous hack of Mat Honan, a senior staffer at Wired, I became a lot more security conscious. It seemed like a wise step to install Spotflux, and I consider the Internet Scout Project quite a reliable source, so I installed it today. -JL
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Create your interactive story by adding multimedia, apps, graphics, text boxes. Organise and structure your storyboard in the way you want. Via Baiba Svenca, villaves56
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From
12most
By Susan Silver
"There is no shortage of creativity at 12 Most. Every week writers from around the web come together to offer their best to the community. Heck, most of our readers are amazing writers in their own right. You should totally think about guest posting here with us.
"Influenced by Kim Phillips’ and Peggy Fitzpatrick’s thoughts on the topic, I began to think more about my own creative process. I realized that I had access to a brilliant group of writers in the 12 Most tribe and posed this question to them, “How do you sustain your creative side?” Below are their answers."
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A very good primer or reminder for student reporters Ken
Journalism can be much more than reporting. An authentic, human narrative touches audiences and keeps them reading. Learn how to shape a human-centered news story, and the importance of facts, context and heart.
Via Ken Morrison
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By Silvia Gallagher
"Turnitin, the leader in originality checking and online grading, today announced its new schedule of 30-minute webcasts to help secondary and higher education institutions advance student writing skills. The new weekly series is a continuation of the popular spring webcast series, which attracted more than 3,000 attendees.
"To register for the webcasts, please visit: http://pages.turnitin.com/WebcastSchedule.html.
“This webcast series is a fast, informative way for educators to learn about recent trends and best practices for integrating technology and pedagogy to improve student writing,” said Jason Chu, senior education manager at Turnitin. “We’ve assembled a terrific team of thought leaders and visionaries to share how we can teach better writing in the digital age.”
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By Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano
"This is the follow up post to the theoretical Wondering About Hyperlinked Writing. The post ended with Now…on from the wondering, theory and resources…to the practice in the classroom.
"Iam ready to bring hyperlinked writing (and reading) as an important genre into the classroom!
"Can one just start “throwing” hyperlinked writing” at our students (or teaches for that matter) at any time, at any age? Is hyperlinked writing part of a process? A process that starts with reading digitally, reading quality and poor samples of digital writing? Students then progress to writing comments, learning how to comment on the writing of others to learning how to write for an audience on their own blog posts. Hyperlinked writing is that next step up in writing for a an audience.
"Hyperlinked writing is more than citing your sources, it is a direct manifestation of writing for an audience."
Great posts, filled with resources and strategies. Tolisano is a wonderful thought leader. -JL
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Not only do we need skills for expository, creative, persuasive and technical writing, but we often write about topics for which we know very little at first. Furthermore, our writing is expected to be motivating while clearly delivering concepts, procedures and facts. Via Alfredo Calderón, Ken Morrison
Ken Morrison's comment,
August 17, 2012 8:19 AM
Thanks for the rescoop. I am glad that I found your site!
Ken 
Louise Robinson-Lay's comment,
August 17, 2012 8:42 AM
Thanks Ken, I'm glad you find it useful. Please feel free to recommend good sites.
Ken Morrison's comment,
August 26, 2012 10:01 AM
Thank you for the rescoop!
I see great resources on your site. Ken
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By Laura Bradley Summary by ASCD SmartBrief
"Middle-school English teacher Laura Bradley in this blog post offers five tips for helping students succeed in the upcoming National Novel Writing Month -- or NaNoWriMo -- Young Writers' Program. Facilitate lots of planning and brainstorming before the writing begins, Bradley writes. Learn the technology, schedule time for students to write and write along with them, she suggests, to turn the activity into a community of writers working toward a common goal, rather than just a writing assignment."
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By Maria Popova.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously remarked. Hardly anyone can back this bombastic proclamation with more empirical conviction than Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn. In 2009, the duo embarked upon a curious experiment: They would purchase cheap trinkets, ask some of today’s most exciting creative writers to invent stories about them, then post the stories and the objects on eBay to see whether the invented story enhanced the value of the object. Which it did: The tchotchkes, originally purchased for a total of $128.74, sold for a whopping total of $3,612.51 — a 2,700% markup. (The most highly valued pairing in the entire project, bought for $1.49 and sold for $197.50, was a globe paperweight with a moving handwritten story by the magnificent Debbie Millman, with proceeds benefiting 826 National.)"
I think this is actually a great way to get young people writing, perhaps minus the Ebay part. But giving them objects to write about can be remarkably liberating and the purposes of the writing can be varied while the objects don't have to change. -JL
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Writing teachers must teach questioning to develop communication and collaboration, two 21st century skills students all must have. Via Lynnette Van Dyke, Paul Rawlinson
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"NewLits.org is a wiki space created to collaboratively develop a rich range of specialist resources for middle school language arts/literacy educators (typically Grades 5 to 8). These resources focus variously and broadly on new literacies and digital technologies. “'New literacies' in the sense used here are literacy practices mediated by digital technologies (e.g., blogging, gaming, social networking), or that are newly recognized as literacies due to their increased ubiquity as a practice (e.g., fanfiction writing, live action role-plays)" More... Via Karen LaBonte
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In this course, consultants from CMU’s Chippewa River Writing Project will lead participants through a one-week open institute focused on the integration of a genre-based, technology-rich approach to [[#|teaching writing]] in an era of the Common Core Standards. During the week of June 25-29, 2012 -- with additional interactions online both before and after the institute -- participants will [[#|work]] with CRWP [[#|teacher]] consultants to better understand the expectations in the CCSS, explore useful digital writing tools, and engage in their own personal writing.
~Great stuff! [klbz] -A lot of excellent resources -JL Via Karen LaBonte
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By Richard Byrne
"Story Map is a free interactive story planning tool from Read Write Think. Story Maps provides four templates for outlining stories. To use the templates students title their stories then choose one of four templates to outline their stories. The four template choices are conflict, setting, character, and resolution. Students can print their completed templates."
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From the website
"We came across four excellent case studies produced by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, an independent research laboratory that supports research and development in educational digital media technologies."
"It is always great to see how teachers are using different technologies in the classroom in unique and inspirational ways. We came across four excellent case studies produced by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, an independent research laboratory that supports research and development in educational digital media technologies.
"The first case study shows Joel Levin, a school technology integrator, using MinecraftEDU with second graders at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in New York City. Joel leads his class through structured game-based scenarios that emphases self-directed learning, collaboration between students, and positive social interactions.
"The second case study shows how Ginger Stevens, a 6th grade special-education teacher at Quest2Learn in New York City, utilizes the intentionally game-like environment of her school to maximize learning for students with special needs."
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Via EdSurge
"This should be fun: a massively open online course (MOOC) on edtech startups, brought to you by David Wiley (Brigham Young), one of the guys who started the idea, Richard Culatta (Dept of Ed), and Todd Manwaring (also BYU). The "course"--if you could call it that--also features a cool lineup of contributors including Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Mark Surman (Mozilla), Jose Ferreira (Knewton), and even EdSurge's Betsy Corcoran. C'mon, climb in!"
From the course website
"Entrepreneurship in Education ("Ed Startup" for short) is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) after the old style - one that focuses more on building community and learning together socially than on watching video clips and answering multiple choice questions. Ed Startup is designed to acquaint educators, educational researchers, and others to the world of entrepreneurship and intrapeneurship, help you decide which one is right for you, and support you in the first steps of your journey. During the course you’ll learn directly with an incredible group of experts (people who have done it before and succeeded) as well as with peers (people who are passionate about making a change for the first time), and work toward transforming your own innovative idea – or another innovative idea established in the research – into a well-designed product or service that can improve the lives of teachers and learners. Ed Startup is completely free and is open to anyone. The course meets weekly from August 27 to December 14th."
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