10 Tools & Resources for Developing Writing Skills

Over the last couple of months I've found and written about a number of really great tools and resources to help improve our students' writing skills. This is a collection of links to reviews of ten of the best.

1. Free Reading Passages and Progress Tracking Tools

This site was designed to help grade K5 - K12 native speaker students develop their reading and comprehension skills, but can also be really useful for second language development. Students can choose from a range of graded texts and get a wide range of interactive activities and reading support. Teachers can also register on the site and assign specific texts to their students.
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2. Using Image Prompts to Inspire Writing & Speaking Activities

As a teacher you can create classes and assign writing tasks to students. The students do their writing tasks within the platform and can publish and share them there. This is a little like posting to a blog, but within a safe environment.
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3. Improve Writing Skills with Peer Evaluation

Getting students to peer evaluate can be a real organisational challenge in the classroom, but now it looks like there is a simple technological solution. Peergrade is a great tool to get students assessing each others’ work and giving each other feedback.Read more

4. Writing & Discussion Activities to Promote Awareness of Fake News

Newspaper Generator is a useful tool that enables you to create what looks like a newspaper front page. To do this you upload an image, select a title and a headline and then write in the details of the story. Then just click on 'Make it' and the site will produce a PDF that you can download
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5. Collaborative Story Writing for the BYOD Classroom

This app is based around a common classroom activity in which students write stories together by adding a sentence and passing it on to another writer. The next writer then adds a sentence and either passes it back or passes it to another student. The process continues until the story is finished.
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6. A Tool to Encourage Students to Self-Correct & Improve their Writing

SAS Writing Reviser is a really cleverly designed Chrome Add-on to get your students self-assessing and improving their own writing. Once installed you can open a document in Google Docs and then decide what aspects of your writing you would like to improve.Read more

7. Illustrate Poems & Create Short Image Based Narrative

This app is also social so users can comment on, follow and like each others creations.I used the app to create an illustration of a poem by Robert Frost - Fire & Ice. This would be nice activity to do with students, either selecting or letting them select a poem to illustrate.
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8. Creating Text Adventures to Develop Reading & Writing Skills

Text adventure games are a great way of really engaging students in reading. They get the chance to take some control of the narrative and find their own way through the story by making choices at various points in the narrative.
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9. Get Teens Writing with Gamified Writing Activities

Story Wars is a great gamified way to make writing creative and competitive.
Students read short chapters of the beginnings of stories and then have to submit the next chapter for the story. The readers of the story can then vote for which new chapter they feel is the best continuation of the story. The one with the most votes becomes part of the story.
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10. Give Young Learners Structured Writing Practice with WritingSparks

This is a great site for giving structure and adding an element of fun to writing activities, especially if you have a data projector so that students can see the prompts on the screen.
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I hope you find these reviews useful and that they help you to choose the right tools and resources to help your students.

Get lesson plans, teaching tips and teacher resource books with our Teachers' Classroom App.

 

 

Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd

Find and Create a Variety of Interactive Activities and Assignments for Your Students

This is a really useful collection of activities assignments and tools for teachers and students.

There are lots of ready made interactive activities designed for learners. You can search through these and find something appropriate for our students. Some of these look a bit homemade, but the functionality and design is sound.

There are also tools you can use to create customised content for your students’ specific needs.

For most of the assignments you need to register on the site and create a class. You can then create assignments for students to do and track their progress.

Some of the activities are translation dependent, so registering (which is free) will also help set the language used.

Some of the activities I liked most are The Manga Maker, Vocalyzer, Essay Rank and Error Spotter. For the ones that involve voice you'll need to make sure students are working on Google Chrome.

In some cases the assignments need a little more instruction on how they are created and how they work, but it certainly looks like this is a resource that will continue to develop if it gets support.

Apps 4 EFL is free, but you can help to support it through Patron and it may well be worth doing so if you find it really useful for your students.

You can find more tools and activities like these in my ebook 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom.

The book is available on iOS or as PDF for other devices.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

Related links:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

10 Great Apps and Games for Enhancing Learning

In this post I'd like to do a quick round up of some of the great apps and games I wrote about during August.

There are some really useful tools, applications and resources here that cover a wide range of functions that can help us to enhance the way our students learn and their levels of engagement.

Make Your Worksheets Digital in Minutes

Telegra.ph is a simple to use tool that can enable you to turn your Word worksheets into online multimedia documents in just a few moments.

Go to the site and add a title, your name and the text of your worksheet. Highlight the text to get formatting options for making the text more attractive or adding links.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/make-your-worksheets-digital-in-minutes.html

Build Professional Level Online and Blended Courses with this Free Plugin

H5P is a tool for building complete courses with a wide variety of interactive task types. The tool works as a plug in with a range of platforms including Moodle, Drupal and Wordpress (all of which have free versions available) .

It’s very easy to install the plug in (took me less than 5 mins with Wordpress) and once this is done you can choose any of the interactive elements to add to your pages.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/build-professional-level-online-and.html

Create Blended Learning with Video Based Discussions

Using Flipgrid you can create a number of grids based around top level themes and then build 'topics' into these that explore specific areas of the overall theme. When you build a topic you can add various video based resources and then students can respond by recording short video clips giving their opinion on the topic.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/create-blended-learning-with-video.html

Create Virtual Reality Comprehension Tasks

Story Spheres is a great free app for creating immersive narrative experiences. It enables you to take the 360 degree panoramic images from your mobile device and covert them into an interactive virtual reality experience.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/create-virtual-reality-comprehension.html

Create Elearning Worksheets for Comprehension & Speaking Homework

This is a great site for building digital interactive worksheets with a whole range of different interactions. You can embed video, images, text or audio into the worksheets and then build a wide range of interactions into them.With some of the activity types, like the open text one, students have the option to write or use voice input in the worksheets.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/create-elearning-worksheets-for.html

Learn English While Saving the Planet with this Great Online Game

Tyto is a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) based around the scenario of a team of students and scientists trying to save humanity by setting up life on a new planet.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/learn-english-while-saving-planet-with.html

Improve Listening Skills with Audio Transcription Software

This is a great tool if you have a lot of transcription work to do, but also a great tool to develop students' listening. You can give them and audio file to transcribe and they can upload it and then check and correct the transcription. Once it's complete they can download and send it to you or peer check each others work.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/improve-listening-skills-with-audio.html

From Image to Story - Motivating Reading Tasks on Powerful Issues

Time 100 is an amaxing feature from Time Magazine. It's a collection of 100 images that have had the power to change the world. The images are displayed on a time line and you can scroll through and click on each image.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/from-image-to-story-motivating-reading.html

 

Convert Your Chrome Browser into a Language Lab for Speaking Practice

Fluency Tutor is a really interesting concept. It is a Chrome plugin that converts a computer into a kind of language lab.

If you sign up as a teacher you can then assign texts to students and they can record themselves reading the text and send it to you for feedback.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/convert-your-chrome-browser-into.html

Creating Dynamic Learning Objects with Genial.ly

This has become one of my favourite tools for creating not just infographics but all kinds of digital content from reading mazes, infograhics and interactive images to video based tasks. Once you have built your learning objects you can either get a link to them or embed them into webpages or blogs.

http://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/creating-dynamic-learning-objects-with.html

 

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

My eBooks:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers

Best
Nik Peachey

 

 

Online Grammar Tools

I was recently looking through my Tools for Teacher & Learners site and searching through the accumulated resources there - More than a thousand links.

I tend to feel that very few people go beyond what's newest on the front page, so I decided to start grouping the links together and posting them here. This first post features some of the best links to grammar orientated sites.

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Deep Grammar

Deep Grammar is a grammar checker based on artificial intelligence. Deep Grammar uses deep learning (artificial neural networks) to learn a model of language. It then uses this model to check text for errors in three steps. 

1. Compute the likelihood that someone would have intended to write the text.
2. Attempt to generate text that is close to the written text but is more likely.
3. If such text is found, show it to the user as a possible correction.

This page demonstrates a prototype of Deep Grammar. It assumes that text has been spell checked. 

You can use this to get students checking, correcting and improving their own written work before they submit it.

http://www.deepgrammar.com/tryitout

Sentence Tree

This is a great site that analyses the grammar of any sentence you type in and tells you the parts of speech of each word within the sentence. 

Students or trainee teachers can use this to analyse sentences and identify structures.

https://foxtype.com/sentence-tree

GrammarFlip

This is grammar instruction for the flipped classroom. Lots of video explanations of grammar points with interactive follow up quizzes. There is even an LMS so you can register your students and track them to make sure they do their homework. 

You can use this to get students learning the grammar at home so that they can spend more time in class doing practice activities and developing their speaking skills.

https://grammarflip.com/

Grammar Gamble

This is a gamified grammar test. Students can gamble amounts of imaginary money depending on how sure they are that they have the right answer. The more they gamble the more points they win, but if they get the answer wrong they loose their money.

You can use this to encourage students to revise their grammar in a more entertaining way. There is even a leader board and students can post their scores through Facebook, etc.

http://www.grammargamble.com/

Verb conjugation tool

This chart enables users to select a common verb and then see the various conjugations of the verb. 

This is a great tool to help students check their verb conjugations, especially for those at lower levels.

http://www.prologo.net/english/

Close Test Creator

If you want to quickly create a close test based on a simple text, just cut and paste it into the main filed and it will take out random words or specific word forms. Great for instant lesson activities. 

This is a great tool to share with students. Teach them how to use it and they can create their own revisions tests.

http://l.georges.online.fr/tools/cloze.html

Hemingway App

This app will analyse students grammar and make suggestions about how to improve it. The suggestions aren’t always right so students will still need to use their judgement.

Like DeepGrammar, this is a great way to get students editing, reviewing and improving their own written work before they submit it to you for marking.

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ 

Telescopic Text
I love this site. Just click on the grey parts of the sentence and watch it extend. This is a great tool for showing students how to develop their writing and make it more interesting by using a range of devices such as clauses, richer adjectives and adverbs and more detail.  You can also create your own sentences using: http://www.telescopictext.org/ 

Get students to develop their writing skills by starting with a basic simple sentence and taking it in turns to add to the sentence and develop it. See which pair of students can build the longest sentence.
http://www.telescopictext.com/ 

I hope you enjoy these sites and find them useful. If you want more grammar related sites just click the link to see more Grammar links

You can find more tools like these in Digital Tools for Teachers

Related links:

• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teacher
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy  

Best

Nik Peachey

Google Spaces for Language Learning

I was never a great fan of Google Wave. It arrived with a real wave of hype and disappeared just as quickly, but it seems that many of the 'gadgets' designed to work with Wave have survived and can now be used independently within a service called Google Shared Spaces.


There are lots of these small gadgets so I decide to have a look at some and see if they had any potential for use in language learning.

Here are examples of some of the more useful ones.

Wave Tube
Here you can add a Video from YouTube to a page and students can watch it and leave comments or ask questions using the chat box on the left.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/AXEFY


Yes/ No / Maybe
This is a simple gadget for creating single question polls that your students can then answer and add comments to.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/UQvGz


yourBrainstormer
This is a nice brainstorming gadget that enables you to create mind maps around a topic. Students can actually vote for or against the elements they like too.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/StD9e



Listy
This is a nice tool for creating 'to do' lists. Anyone can add to the list of things to do and then tick them off as they are done.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/UVbjU


Magnetic Fridge Poetry
This is a nice tool for creating jumbled text activities. You just add your text when you create your board and then students can drag the words around wherever they want them.
Try this one: http://goo.gl/nCigp


These are just a few of the interactions you can create with the Shared Spaces. There are lots more, so why not try a few out, feel free to play with the ones I've created and let me know which ones work for you.

Related links:

• Create Image Books
• Microsoft's free Learning Content Development System
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Creating an interactive cloze text
• Create Quick Interactive Activities
• How to Make a Word Search Puzzle for your Blog
• Cloze Test Creation Tool

Best

Nik Peachey

4 Similar Tools to Wordle

Wordle, a very simple tool for creating graphic word clouds of texts, has rocked the Edtech world and inspired a huge number of blog posts and teaching ideas, including my own back in September of 2008. That's why I decided to use it as the basis for the first task in a web based 1 week open free workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers that I'm moderating for SEETA.

As so many people are already familiar with Wordle, I thought I'd also share a few similar tools that can be used instead of or alongside Wordle with other web based resources to create useful learning materials for students. I've also added these here for anyone who doesn't make it along to the workshop.

• Wordnik (no connection to the Nik in my name) is a great tool for helping students find out more information about word and create lists or related words to help them remember the words. It provides lots of great examples of the words being used and draws on social media sites for the examples, so you can see how the word is used in Twitter, see what images are tagged with the word in Flickr and lots more.
• I wrote about Wordnik about a year ago when it was still Wordie, so look at this review if you want a bit more information. Creating word lists
• I also created an activity for students to help them use the tool to work autonomously to develop their vocabulary. It needs a bit of updating now that the site has changed to Wordnik, but should give you some ideas about how it can be used I hope. List Your Favourite Words
  

• Wordsift does a similar thing to Wordle, in that it produces a word cloud of words from a text, but it is far less visual and more functional. Once your students have produced the word cloud they can start actually clicking on the words and exploring their meanings and getting examples.
• I wrote a review of WordSift here which shows a bit more about how to use it.Analysing Vocabulary in Texts
• Here’s an example of how I’ve tried to integrate it with other web based tools and resources to create an activity for students to work on independently. Find Out More About Texts
  

• Vocab Grabber is another tool that can be used to get more information about the words from a text. Vocab Grabber is more of a Dictionary / Thesaurus tool that pulls in information about words in a text, gives examples and also shows related words and word families.
• I wrote this activity which exploits some marketing videos that have scripts along with WordGrabber and another tool called Future Me. I tried to use the combination of these tools to show how students could build good habits to enable them to learn, remember and revise new vocabulary. Develop Your Marketing Vocabulary
  

• Easy define is a new tool that I just spotted this morning. It is a bit like a dictionary - word list creation tool. You simply type in a list of words ( or even paste in a complete text) and it will generate dictionary entries for all the words. You can then download these as a doc file or copy and past them. It will also produce a list of synonyms.
• This is a great tool for creating paper based vocabulary worksheets. Once you’ve typed in your list or text and generated the definitions, you can simply download it and edit to create vocabulary records or matching activities. Should be a big time saver. You could get students to create word lists from their Wordle images.
  

I hope these tools are useful and if you know of other similar tools that you think are useful, please do post a link to them below, especially if you can include links to any materials you've created with them that you would like to share.

Related links:

• 50 + Vocabulary building activities for students
• 20 + Tools and tips for developing vocabulary
• Cloze Test Creation Tool
• AI and Chat Bots for EFL ESL
• Picture phrases
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage

Best

Nik Peachey