Did you ever want to show the students the mistakes that keep occurring within their writing as a class? Do you want to show them the variety of words, or lack of, that are a part of their writing? There is an easy and very visual way to do this called Word Clouds. You can enter an entire class of papers by copying and pasting using digital copies of student papers before they turn in their finals.
www.wordle.netOnce you have entered the papers, the words that are not common like "the" or "it" can be removed and the rest of the vocabulary used by a class put together. The bigger the word, the more often it was used. Above is a demonstration of a paper that was entered into Wordle and you can see the correlation to how often a word is used. The same will show up with common mistakes in spelling.
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Creating a book is a great exercise to get the mind flowing when it comes to students. They like to be able to come up with a story that intrigues those that read it. How great would it be to actually develop a book and see it on a virtual bookshelf? There are apps that allow the students to write text, attach visuals, and narrate their book with ease. It is simple and yet it will give students the chance to write within their own genre of technology as a digital native.
BookCreator is an example of one of the applications found to easily help students create a book, but it costs $4.99. While Little Story Maker and Bindle are free and will allow the students to create and share just like BookCreator.
Once done, you and the students within the classroom can hold discussions on Subtext about the books that were created by individuals within the classroom. Subtext doesn't only allow you to discuss the books developed within the classroom, but if there are books downloaded as a classroom set you can add questions and assignments to the end of each chapter while requiring them to comment as they read the book. This program is free to everyone and can be used on the iPads.
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Here is a website that looks interesting, Magnetic Poetry. The site gives the words to the player (students) and they develop magnetic poetry that looks like kitchen magnets. They have the same words for everyone, but it changes each week. Therefore the students can be using the same words, but the way they put it together is up to them and easy to generate. They can share their creation with you through your email. It would be an easy and fun way to get the students to practice poetry.
Magnetic Poetry
Shadow Poetry
There are also free apps for the mini iPad such as PoetryMagnets and Word Magnets. Just explore for more options by typing in poetry magnet into google.
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