25 Free Sites to Teach Writing

By Karen Schweitzer

The web is a great resource for writing teachers who need lesson plans, writing prompts, interactive activities, high-tech tools, and other free teaching materials. Here are 25 sites that would be particularly useful to educators who teach writing.

Karen Schweitzer is an education writer, editor, and author. She has written eight books for middle school students and is in the process of writing her first fiction novel. Karen serves as the About.com Guide to Business School, a site that offers guidance to prospective, current, and former business school students. She also writes regularly for OnlineColleges.net, a site that provides information about accredited online colleges.

Purdue's OWL - Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides more than 200 resources that can be used to teach writing.

Writing Fix - The Writing Fix is a very useful resource for writing teachers. The site offers lesson plans, writing prompts, and other classroom materials.

The Teaching Portal - The Teaching Portal is unique resource for classroom teachers who want to introduce their students to the art of story writing. Site features include writing exercises, worksheets, and lesson plans.

TeAchnology - TeAchnology provides access to many different writing resources, including lesson plans, workbooks, worksheets, story starters, and writing rubrics.

Thinkfinity - Thinkfinity is a Verizon Foundation Initiative that provides high quality teaching content for educators. The site offers interactive activities, original lesson plans, and a lesson search engine that pulls results from other respected sites around the web.

ReadWriteThink- This International Reading Association (IRA) website is an excellent place to find free teaching resources for the classroom. The site offers lesson plans, information on IRA and NCTE standards, a web resource gallery, and a student materials index.

Writing Den - Designed for grade six to grade twelve students, the Writing Den offers resources to improve vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing skills. The site also provides a section to help teachers incorporate Writing Den materials into the curriculum.

We The Teachers - This online community for teachers is a great place to find teaching ideas and lesson plans for the writing classroom. The site allows teachers to connect with other educators and share lesson plans online.

Shmoop - Shmoop is fun, new site with literature guides, poetry guides, and other teacher resources.

PoetryTeachers.com - This Meadowbrook Press website is a favorite among poetry teachers. The site offers tips on teaching poetry, free poetry activities, and other useful materials.

Grammar Girl - The weekly Grammar Girl podcast is short enough to play in the classroom and entertaining enough to engage students. Each episode includes quick tips for better writing and an answer to a weekly question.

Online Grammar Handbook - This online handbook from the University of Minnesota offers 21 chapters of links to punctuation and grammar resources. The handbook also includes writing instruction and other materials that would be useful to teachers.

Chomp Chomp - Chomp Chomp is a fun grammar site with definitions to common grammar terms, interactive exercises, teacher handouts, and classroom presentations.

VerbaLearn - VerbaLearn is a fantastic resource for teachers who want to improve their students' vocabulary. The site offers customizable lessons, learning activities, and more.

ThinkFold - ThinkFold offers a structured online environment for writing classes or writing partners to collaborate online. Workgroups can upload documents, interact with a share outline, and see changes being made in real time.

Mindmeister - Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool that can be used to help writing students visualize their ideas.

Scholastic Story Starter - This free online story starter from Scholastic generates fun story ideas for K-6 writers. An example starter: Write a brief biography of a thousand year old vampire who rides a giant sloth to work.

The Story Starter - The Story Starter offers nearly 400,000,000 creative writing prompts and story ideas for writing teachers and students.

Creative Writing Prompts - This site provides more than 300 creative writing prompts and journaling ideas.

Writewith - Originally developed by two college newspaper editors who lived on opposite sides of the country, this free web-based app can be used to write and collaborate online.

Scriblink - Scriblink is a free online whiteboard that can be used by students and teachers who want to collaborate on a writing project. The board is entirely private and only open to people who are invited.

Twitter - Twitter can be used for a lot of different things, but is especially good for classrooms who want to collaborate together on a story or poem. Each student can post 140 characters at a time until the piece is finished.

FanStory - Founded in 2000, FanStory is an online writing community that welcomes posts from writers of all ages. Community members can participate in contests and challenge one another to write on different topics.

NaNoWriMo Every November, NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) challenges writers to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days time. Teachers who want to challenge their older students can point to this site and encourage everyone to get involved.

The Online Books Page - Getting students to read good books is sometimes the best way to begin teaching writing. The Online Books Page offers more than 30,000 classic books that can be read for free online.

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Collaborative Writing in the Classroom

How is Web 2.0 changing the way we write? And how can it change the way we teach writing?

We recently ran into a very interesting free website, MixedInk , that can be used for a collaborative approach to writing in the classroom. Here is a guest blog posting by the founder of MixedInk, Vanessa Scanfield.

Collaborative Writing in the 21st Century Classroom, by Vanessa Scanfield, CEO, MixedInk.

Advances in technology are provoking broad structural shifts in business, media, and government. These new technologies are enabling (and, in some cases, forcing) organizations and individuals to adjust in order to capitalize on new opportunities. Success now hinges upon an organization’s capacity to take advantage of a distributed workforce, employ democratic decision-making, and harness collaborative relationships.

Schools are reacting by incorporating 21^st century skills into the classroom. While the term itself is a bit vague, the overarching concept is that students should be moving beyond traditional curricular elements, delving into civic engagement projects, honing their critical thinking and collaboration skills, harnessing technology to produce better work products, and demonstrating the cultural awareness and leadership needed to succeed in college and beyond.

Teachers today have adopted a range of innovative tools to meet these demands.

• Classroom blogs, like Extreme Biology, supplement class discussion and highlight student work;

• wikis, such as Anatowiki, enable students to build a collective knowledge base;

• social networks, such as the Flat Classroom Project, connect students across classrooms, schools, and even countries;

• podcasts can make challenging class projects; and

• Twitter enables real-time participation and provides a new, creative outlet for writing.

These tools offer engaging learning solutions that reimagine the classroom as a place where students provide valuable contributions and learn from interacting with one another, rather than a space built simply for the one-way transfer of information.

I co-founded a startup, MixedInk, which helps to build a range of 21^st century skills across the curriculum. We offer a free, online collaborative writing platform that enables students to weave their ideas and language into a single text.

To use MixedInk, a teacher first sets up a project for the class to collaborate on a collective text. Over a period ranging from days to weeks, students write original versions of the text, edit others’ work, and weave different versions together to form new ones. Throughout the process, students comment on submissions and rate different versions to bring the best-written, most popular ideas to the top. In the end, the class can explore the strengths and weaknesses of the top collective text(s).

This demo video provides a helpful overview:

MixedInk Demo from MixedInk on Vimeo.

Simply by participating in a MixedInk project, students are exposed to a wide range of their peers' work. As they remix the best parts of various essays, students are challenged to critically evaluate the quality of what they read. When students rate and comment on submissions, they must analyze why they prefer some texts and not others. Perhaps most importantly, students hone their ability to recognize compelling concepts and their capacity to synthesize these ideas seamlessly into a single text. Those of us who have worked in groups to write grants, press releases, marketing materials, and mission statements know well the lasting value of this particular skill.

In January, Slate Magazine invited its readers to produce a collective inaugural address using MixedInk. In addition to borrowing language from other contributors, those who participated were able to borrow from the inaugural addresses of all the previous presidents. More than 400 people, including many students, collaborated to produce an eloquent speech, which was published at Slate.com on inauguration day. Though originally intended for an adult audience, the project offered a unique learning experience for the classrooms that participated.

Educational tools like MixedInk are built to nurture students’ creativity, harness their enthusiasm, and ensure their readiness to succeed in an increasingly digital world. In the comments, let us know which new media tools you have incorporated successfully, how you have used collaborative writing in the classroom, and suggestions for how to incorporate collaborative writing across different subjects.

Learning, Frivolity, and "Leeroy Jenkins!"

by Lester Smith

Lester Smith is a Writer/Technologist at Sebranek, Inc., parent company of Write Source. He is a 1989 graduate of Illinois State University with a BA in English, Magna cum laude, Honors in English, University Honors Scholar, and with a minor in Spanish. In 1985, while pursuing his degree, he began working as a writer and editor for Game Designers' Workshop in Normal, Illinois, which led to a design position with TSR (publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons® game) in 1991. He joined the staff of Sebranek, Inc. in 1998 as an assistant writer and Webmaster. In 2000 he led the creation of the company's e-Publishing Department. Currently he maintains the company's Websites and podcasts, troubleshoots technology issues, and contributes as a writer and editor to various projects. In his spare time, he is president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.

My first publishing job was as a hobby game designer. That position paid my way through college and kept my family in beans and bacon for about fifteen years prior to my finding employment at Write Source. But early on as a game designer, I struggled with guilt over writing in the entertainment industry—a field our pastor at the time condemned as part of "America's sinful preoccupation with fun."

Then I started seeing the letters parents sent to game designers like Gary Gygax, letters praising hobby games for giving their children a reason to read, a reason to care about math, a new interest in history, a new venue for their own writing. (Many young hobby fans end up publishing articles in hobby magazines both online and off.) And I met the kids themselves at conventions, teenagers who were often painfully shy and who felt they had no place in the world, until they discovered a community of gamers in their area. Any sense of lingering puritanical shame I might have had faded away as I watched young people have fun, socialize, and even learn something.

Fun in Education

Today while driving to work, I was mulling over that perceived schism between fun and productivity, between enjoyment and learning. And suddenly the example of "Leeroy Jenkins!" put it in a new perspective. In the "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, Leeroy Jenkins is a character who became notorious back in 2006 for ignoring the plans under discussion by his group (plans specifically to gain items for him, by the way) and charging headlong into battle—thereby getting the whole group of characters killed ignominiously. A video of the whole farce was subsequently published on YouTube (warning: the language is sometimes salty), and the story became an Internet phenomenon.

Here's what struck me today about the Leeroy Jenkins story: First, the setting is entertainment—a "fun" setting, if you will. Second, within this setting, a group of roughly a dozen people is working out a resource-management strategy to accomplish a shared goal. At one point, you can even hear them doing number crunching to determine the percentage chance of success. These social, mathematical, and resource-management skills are the same tools used in real-world problem solving. Third, one character bent only on fun destroys it all.

The contrast between productive fun and pointless frivolity is sharply outlined in this example. That's a distinction typically missed in discussions about education—even about writing and literature, in which creativity is assumed. Our puritanical roots seem to suggest that work or achievement (the whole "sweat of your brow" thing) is antithetical to fun and enjoyment.

Granted, work can be difficult. But I thoroughly enjoy my job—I have fun at this thing called writing and with the topic of education. And I suspect you enjoy your job, too. Why? First, because this is work we care about. We enjoy nurturing these skills in young people. Second, it is work that involves problem solving. Just like the characters in the Leeroy Jenkins example, we have to apply the means at hand (our knowledge, available textbooks, class computer resources) within the constraints of the setting (class time, student backgrounds, admininistrative dictates) to achieve our goal (encouraging literacy and learning). This is, in effect, our playground, our game, our ball.

Engaging Students in School

If we want students to be equally engaged, we need to share the playground with them. This means not only involving them in problem solving but also allowing them work they care about. When it comes to assignments in writing, students care most when they are allowed to choose topics they're interested in and when they know their writing will find an audience beyond the teacher.

Clever teachers can use this to their advantage. Take a look at the content you need to cover in a semester. In an English course, this might be a particular literary genre or form of writing. In a social studies course, it might be a particular geographical region or time period. In a science course, it might be cellular biology. Now have your students write proposals for specific topics within that realm. Tell them they can write about anything they like, as long as their proposals convince you (an exercise in persuasive writing) of its relation to the general subject.

Once their topics are set, turn them loose to write (we recommend a workshop environment), with the understanding that their work will be shared with the class at large. In most cases, their writing will involve at least some research (even this blog entry required me to research the specifics of the Leeroy Jenkins story). While they're going through the writing process, you can be considering the class's topics as a whole, to determine what gaps might be left in the overall subject—gaps you may have to fill yourself.

As students complete their writing, have them present it to the class as a whole. After each presentation, lead a class question-and-answer session, allowing the presenter to fill in details from his or her research, and—if necessary—adding details of your own. (Just remember to support, not overshadow, the student.) To be most effective, you can work yourself into the presentation rotation, sharing a piece of your own writing, followed by the same sort of question-and-answer session. (This is your opportunity to fill in the previously mentioned gaps.)

In the end, the class will have covered a broader range of topics, in more depth, than if you had delivered the same material in lecture mode. Further, they will have done it in writing, with a real audience. And they will have a greater sense of ownership of the material. What's more, they will have had fun—without being merely frivolous.

In the end, if we want to treat students like adults, teaching them the joy of accomplishment may be the most important lesson of all.

Files from Dennis O'Connor's Webinar

These are the files from The Writing Teacher Webinar on June 2, 2009.

Note: if you want to receive these articles via e-mail, follow the instructions here.

The topic of the webinar was on editing, not correcting: how to teach your students to be self aware writers while at the same time reducing you editing and correcting workload.

6 Plus 1 Traits: An eight-page scoring continuum for NWREL's 6+1 Traits of Writing

Why Do My Students Hate Grammar and Editing: a six page article by Jeff Anderson

The Express Lane Edit: Making Editing Useful for Adolescents: a five-page article by Jerome G. Harste and Christine Leland describing their journey from re-writers to editing coaches.

Writing Next: a sixty-page report on what works in teaching writing by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin for the Carnegie foundation.

Slides: the slides that Dennis used during the webinar.

As soon as we get an archive of the actual webinar, we will link to it.

We would like to thank LearningExpress eFolio for sponsoring this blog. eFolio is an automated essay scoring program, which allows teachers to assign more writing practice without the added hours of editing and correcting.

Tired of Being a Red Ink Slave to Corrections?

Dennis O'Connor previously wrote How to Introduce the Six Traits for The Writing Teacher, and teaches writing instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Stoudt. In addition to teaching and consulting, he maintains two invaluable websites: 6-Traits Resources 21st Century Information Fluency  This article is a preview of a free webinar that Dennis will be providing on June 2, at 2:00 PM Eastern time. If you are interested in attending the webinar, click here.

Editing, Not Correcting

How do you respond to the statement: Correcting isn't teaching!

Think about it: all correcting does is make you a better proofreader. Students more often than not ignore your hard work. You as a teacher feel obligated to take out the red pen, while in your heart you know this just isn't working. Don't you see the same errors over and over again? How many times can you check, highlight, underline and explain in the margins that a lot is two words? What else can you do? Isn't every English teacher obliged to correct the work of their students? Isn't that the expectation of parents and administration?

What if you shift the burden of correcting to the student where it belongs? You can do this by integrating editing skills into the writing process from day one. If you establish simple routines by editing every day you can chip a way at the persistent problems without bleeding red ink after school and every weekend.

Many teachers use a daily oral language approach. Let's make it a daily integrated editing exploration approach and stop correcting for our students!

• Encourage students to re-read their work at every stage of the writing process.

• Be sure students read their own work aloud.

• Introduce and use the basic proofreading symbols

• Start each class with a brief editing sponge or transitional activity.

• Periodically assemble a list of Editing Essentials to tally the collective skills of the group

• Collect and organize mentor sentences for modeling usage and grammar concepts

• Throughout the year, have your students choose e-portfolio samples that document student progress

Edit Anonymous Authentic Samples

Practice editing skills with a variety of anonymous sample sentences or paragraphs in need of specific corrections. Toss the work sheets and find samples from the real world.

• Use student papers that display the most persistent problems.

• Find samples in online student publications like KMSoul .

• Use the NWREL 6-Traits database of student work.

Better yet, use the Notable Sentences Blog a treasure chest of well organized examples. Self proclaimed "sentence stalker" Loren Wolter maintains this remarkable resource. Her blog is a collaboratively build collection of sample sentences organized to address editing essentials like grammar, syntax, figurative language and many other aspects of writing. These model sentences provide powerful teaching examples and pave the way for meaningful, traits inspired, writing process oriented grammar explorations.

Remember: It is far easier to work on a sample than to edit your own work. Provide process practice before you move to self-editing.

Fresh Eyes Edit Better

When it does come time for your students to edit their important pieces, be sure the writing has time to cool.

• Waiting a few days allows a writer to edit with fresh eyes.

• Try reading the text backwords to discover invisible errors like repeated articles.

• Zoom word processed text or switch to a larger font to see the words in a different way.

Focus on One Type of Error at a Time

Here's a professional proofreader's trick: focus on a single specific issue to keep things manageable. If you try to edit for capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar at the same time you overwhelm your weaker editors, causing them to shut down. For younger students, this may mean starting with just end punctuation or capitalization. For older students, the focus may be the rules of dialog or the use of quotation marks.

Integrate Editing into the Writing Process

Students who can revise and edit their own work are on the way to becoming independent writers. Editing helps writers understand their own voice. I'm not advocating a close spell check and punctuation drill early in the process. Too much focus on correctness can stunt fluency. Instead encourage re-reading and reading aloud as part of the writing/editing process. This habit will provide opportunities for students to experiment with usage as they go.

Model by Thinking Out Loud

Often we expect students to 'hear' or 'see' grammatical problems by applying a mental filter based on their previous exposure to language. Not all students have this filter. This is especially true for English language learners or students with learning disabilities. This is why it is so important to model the editing process using the think aloud method.

Put up an sample of your own weak first draft writing on an overhead projector or computer screen. Talk your way through a quick editing process. Broadcast your inner monologue as you tear into the typical problems you want to address. Modeling your own process shows students how important writing is to you and creates a safer learning atmosphere.

Where Will I Find the Time?

If you find yourself saying, I don't have time for one more thing in my curriculum, you'll love Jeff Anderson's insightful article Express Lane Editing Techniques. His field tested methods for modeling editing and re-reading throughout the writing process are practical and effective. Anderson suggests we approach grammar as.."something to be explored, not just corrected".

Anderson is also the author of the books: Mechanically Inclined and Everyday Editing. His books provide a road map for integrating powerful editing practices into the writing process. This isn’t dry academic writing. Anderson comes from the classroom and has a voice and outlook are seasoned by the realities we all face everyday.

I started thinking of how we taught editing at our school. It looked like a series of half-baked attempts to solve a problem that we were not sure how to fix. If I asked my sixth-grade class to correct a sentence riddled with errors, did that show them editing is a powerful tool? When I looked at their faces, I had to admit the answer was a re-sounding, “No!”

Set Parent Expectations

Parents expect red ink. You will be pressured to teach the good old-fashioned way. Still, the good old-fashioned way (correcting) just doesn't work. A thoughtful letter home at the beginning of the year is a good idea. Explain your editing approach. Help parents understand that you value independent correctness. Be consistent and proactive. Periodically, send an editing paragraph home and ask parents to work together with their children on the edit. Consider inviting parents who are strong editors to work in your classroom, and train them to teach editing.

Reality Check on Editing

Finally, accept the fact that not everyone will be a strong editor. A writer with a talent for unique ideas and a powerful voice may be very weak in the conventions of writing. Consider Wilson Rawls, author of Where the Red Fern Grows. Rawls was so ashamed of his spelling, punctuation, and grammar that he burned all his manuscripts and almost gave up writing. Yet who can deny the lyrical genius of his prose?

Writing is too often judged by correctness alone. Do good manners insure fine character? Does polished chrome and a fine paint job create a competitive race car? By balancing conventions (correctness) with the other traits of writing; ideas, voice, organization, word choice, and sentence fluency, you help students find their strengths, while working on their weaknesses.

In the end, by teaching instead of correcting, you arm all of your students with some independent editing skills. You help them on the road to becoming independent writer.

You've done the job. Relax, take the weekend off!

We would like to thank LearningExpress eFolio for sponsoring this blog. eFolio is an automated essay scoring program, which allows teachers to assign more writing practice without the added hours of editing and correcting.

Additional Editing Resources:

Teaching and Assessing Writing with the Six Traits (UW-Stout Online Class)

Conventions Homepage (WritingFix)

6-Traits Resources Blog: Jeff Anderson The Write Guy (a guided tour of Anderson's online resources.)

Loren Wolter Notable Sentences...For Imitation and Creation

Resources from Jeff Anderson:

The Write Guy (Jeff Anderson's Website)

Mechanically Inclined (Google Book Preview)

Mechanically Inclined Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer's Workshop

Making editing useful for young Adolescents

Grammar intertwined throughout the writing process: An “inch wide and a mile deep”

Zooming In and Zooming Out:Putting Grammar in Context into Context (PDF)