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Digital Writing Tools for the Classroom

Learn new strategies and lesson ideas to weave more writing throughout your curriculum. 

Grades K-12

Twitter Chat: Tips, Tools, and Strategies for Digital Writing

Begin with this Twitter chat archive that defines digital writing, discusses its place within new digital literacies, explores strategies that support learning across subject areas, and shares tips for using tech tools to support multimodal literacy.

Grades K-12

Digital Storytelling Resources

View this TeachersFirst editors' curated list of reviewed resources to find tools to engage and excite students about writing. Tools for all grade levels are shared (many available as apps), along with tips for writing in your class.

Grades 7-12

Teach Writing With The New York Times: A Free School-Year Curriculum in 7 Units

Check out this amazing curriculum for middle and high school students that includes 7 units: Personal Narrative Essay, Analysis and Connection-Making, Argumentative Writing, and others. Each unit includes teaching ideas, webinars, and writing prompts.

Tools to Engage, Inspire, & Understand

Help students make writing clear and more enjoyable with this set of writing tools.

Grades 5-12

Write and Improve

Receive instant feedback on you writing, including a graph of your writing level and tracks. To get started, choose a topic, writing level (beginner to advanced), and writing choice (ranging from postcard responses to longer articles).

Grades 5-12

WriteWell

Make the writing process fun and engaging with clear and easy to use writing tools. Search templates for a specific type of writing or select from content links on the home page. Each template includes an example and description plus more.

Grades 8-12

Contexted

Use Contexted to create mind maps using your notes to form visualizations of related content. Build a Wiki-like knowledge base from your text and notes. Type or paste text and highlight words to create links to online resources or add notes.

Writing Challenges for Your Class

Excite students to write with these three diverse challenges.

Grades 3-8

Writing Movie Reviews

Engage your students in writing about movies with this thorough lesson plan. The included templates guide students through the observation and evaluation process as they reflect upon movie reviews and write a review based upon the supplied rubric.

Grades 4-12

The Most Dangerous Writing Prompt App

How long can your students write without stopping? Set a writing time goal and test your students' typing persistence. Choose how long you want to write or how many words, then start writing. If you hesitate for five seconds, all of your work disappears!

Grades K-12

Writing Sparks

Find a writing challenge to spark for your pupils' creativity. To begin simply choose the age range of students, the type of writing spark (story, poems, news article, or opinion), set the time limit, and then begin.

This Week at TeachersFirst

Learn all about Blendspace, a free tool to support blended and flipped learning, by joining our free, quality virtual workshop (earn certificate) and reading our related blog posts. Discover helpful tools and tips for managing a productive classroom. And, finally, we kindly ask for your input in our weekly poll.