Pixteller

With Pixteller teachers can create images, banners, posters and greeting cards. It's pretty friendly to use. There are ready made templates that your students can just edit.

This is a tutorial

Application in the classroom:

Pixteller can be useful after a reading assignment, students can create a book cover, they can create posters about the different characters in the story, send birthday cards, can write their own short poems, etc. 
Can you think of other ideas? Please write a comment.

Wordle

Wordle creates word clouds from text that you provide. Wordle is a powerful way to really get through to visual learners.

How to use Wordle:

• Select all of the text that you would like and then copy it to the clipboard.
• Go to http://wordle.net.
• Click on Create your own.
• Paste the text.
• Either use a screen capture program to obtain the Wordle as a graphic or save the Wordle in the public gallery and use the code provided in your blog or web page.

Applications in the classroom:

• students write a story/poem based on the Wordle
• teachers create a Wordle and review vocabulary that was previously taught
• as a pre reading exercise ask students to predict what the main ideas of the reading will be about based on a Wordle
• Find what ideas are most important in a famous speach/poem/story

If you have any other good ideas please write in the comments below.

Piclits for Creative Writing

Piclits is a great easy to use tool to encourage students to write creatively.  It revovles around attention grabbing images and word banks for writing a caption, a short paragraph or a short poem/story. Word lists are categorized by nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and a universal list.

Piclits offers a fun way to learn new vocabulary and play with word forms and sentence structure.


See the full PicLit at PicLits.com


There are two options for writing: one is by dragging and dropping words unto the picture and the second is by clicking on the freestyle button. You can save and edit a Piclit if you sign up. If you don't sign up you can still save your Piclit by using the Snipping tool in windows (here is a short video explaining how to do it).


Application in the classroom:

• Students find a picture that relates to current events and write about it
• Students write a short poem 
• Students write events that happened before a story that they read
• Students write about a different ending to a story that they read
• Students create a slogan/banner for a campaign
• Students find a picture that relates to the way they feel and write about it

If you have any more ideas, write to me!