Use the Pulp-O-Mizer to create a fun-looking and over-the-top pulp magazine cover. You can download your creation, though you can’t save it to the web. And if you or your students want some inspiration, you can always check out 8 … Continue reading →

BoomWriter is an excellent free site for students and teachers for enhancing reading and writing skills.  This is done through an educational portal in a competitive story writing competition.  This is done by having students type a chapter of a story then have their peers vote on the ''winning'' chapter to be included in the finished book.  Once ...

I’m a big proponent of the Picture Word Inductive Model as a strategy for English Language Learners to develop reading and writing skills (I describe it in detail in this month’s ASCD Educational Leadership in my article, Get Organized Around … Continue reading →

Clozes, also known as “gap-fills” or “fill-in-the-blanks,” are short texts with blanks. Students have to “fill in” what they believe to be the missing words. They are excellent tools for assessing reading comprehension and vocabulary development. We use them several … Continue reading →

Boom Writer is a site I've blogged about in the past and am very impressed with.  This is a wonderful, free, innovative site, to not only spark creativity through the creation of writing a collaborative book, but also ignite the joy of reading through assessing peers works.  Also, BW is designed for grades 4th-12th.  In simple terms Boom Writer ...

I would call Thoora a tool to create a daily personalized virtual newspaper, and you can read more about it at a TechCrunch post. The interface is clear and clean, and easy to use. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Creating Personalized “Newspapers” Online. addthis_url = ...

Book Club It is a new web tool that lets you easily create and participate in online book discussion groups. After registering, you can quickly find a thumbnail image of pretty much any book out there and set privacy options (you can make it public, or can set it so you can only access it [...]

Gangaroo lets your search for pretty much any product on Amazon and other sites, click on it, write a review of it, and then the image, your description and your review will show up on a public list. You can make separate lists of books, DVD’s, music CD’s, etc. You can post the url address [...]

News PaPair lets members summarize news stories and question and comment on them. It’s similar to Spotery and Brikut. All three are now on The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience” list. addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Flarryferlazzo.edublogs.org%2F2011%2F03%2F29%2Fnews-papair%2F'; addthis_title = ...

Scoop.it lets you first identify a topic. Then, it continually finds items on the web related to that topic in a nice interface. Then, with one click, it lets you “scoop it” into your own personalized newspaper (that’s what I’m calling it, not them) which you can then share. It’s an ongoing [...]