Good Tools for Student Writers

StoryToolz offers a good collection of free tools for student writers. Writers who are struggling to come up with ideas for fiction stories will like the story starters featured on StoryToolz. StoryToolz has three tools that you can use to get story ideas; Random Conflicts, Half Title Generator, and Story Idea Generator. In addition to the writing prompts tools StoryToolz offers a few tools to help you edit your work. The Cliché Buster analyzes your work to find clichés that you have used in your writing. The Readability tool analyzes your text to estimate a reading level on several scales.


Applications for Education
StoryToolz offers tools that are useful to almost every student. Students in creative writing courses could benefit from the story idea generators. Likewise, teachers can use the tools to find prompts to give to students. The writing analysis tools could be used by students to help them edit their writing before giving it to you or a peer for editing.

5 Ways for Students to Publish in Under a Minute

There are many excellent platforms that teachers and students can use to create and maintain a blog throughout the school year. Depending upon your chosen purpose for student blogging, some platforms are better than others. But if you just want students to occasionally publish an essay to the web for peer review, you might not need a full-fledged blogging platform. Here are five ways that you can have students publish their essays to the web in under a minute (writing and editing time excluded).

Pencamp is a simple platform for quickly publishing your writing. To get started writing and publishing with Pencamp just enter a name for your page and enter specify a password for editing then start writing. Pencamp is not a blogging platform it's a platform for publishing an informational article or story about a specific topic. You can create as many Pencamp pages as you like for free. Commenting is not an option on Pencamp pages.

Scriffon is a simple service for writing and publishing online. Scriffon isn't a blogging platform, it's a writing platform. That means that you cannot edit the layout or navigation on the page on which your writing is published. Each writing that you publish is given it's own url. You can go back and edit your writing even after it has been published. If you want to you can use multiple pen names under your Scriffon account name too.

Pen.io is a simple blogging service that you can start using in a minute or less. To use Pen.io just head to the site, name your page, and select a password for editing. Once you've done those things you can start blogging. To edit your page just click on any of the predefined text and start typing. To add more pages just type the the ":page" tag, to insert videos just type the ":video" tag. One short-coming that Pen.io has is that it doesn't support images yet.

Wordfaire is a new service for quickly creating and updating a live blog. To use Wordfaire just sign-in with your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account. Once you've signed-in just choose a url and name for your blog  then you can start blogging. Wordfaire updates as soon as you stop typing and hit "update." People viewing your blog will see your updates as soon as you press "update."

This one does assume that your students already have a Google Docs account in some form either through your school's domain or as a stand alone account. If your students do their writing in Google Docs they can publish their final drafts as stand alone webpages by selecting "publish to web" from the "share" menu. Then they can distribute the links to their pages however they like.

Bonus item: Writing Prompts.

Image Credit

Toasted Cheese is a daily writing prompt site that publishes prompts on a monthly calendar. The whole month is laid out for you with a different prompt each day. Don't see anything you like on the current calendar? That's okay, click through the previous months to find old prompts. Periodically, Toasted Cheese holds writing contests which you can learn about by clicking on the links on the calendar. The writing contests are based on one or more of the prompts from the calendar.

Pencamp - Quickly Publish Your Writing Online

Pencamp is a simple platform for quickly publishing your writing. To get started writing and publishing with Pencamp just enter a name for your page and enter specify a password for editing then start writing. Pencamp is not a blogging platform it's a platform for publishing an informational article or story about a specific topic. You can create as many Pencamp pages as you like for free. Commenting is not an option on Pencamp pages. Check out the Pencamp page that I started about my dog Morrison.

Applications for Education
If you're looking for a service that will allow your students to publish their writing online without having to got through the process of creating a full-fledged blog, Pencamp could be just what you need. Because there is not a registration process you could have a whole class of students working online without losing much classroom time to walking students through a registration process.

So You Want To Be a Writer?

Image credit

This morning I happened to overhear a student talking to one of my colleagues about the student's desire to become a writer. My colleague was encouraging the student to continue working on his writing if he enjoys it, but my colleague was also telling the student how difficult it is to get published and reach an audience. As they were wrapping up the conversation I jumped in to encourage the student to start a blog to share his writings with family and friends. I briefly mentioned that as he audience grew that could open up some other writing opportunities and some potential income. My point was not that writing a blog would get the student a book deal or make him any money. Rather my point was that if he wants to be a writer and have people read his work, a blog gives him the power to do that without having to go through the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing world.

Three Ways Independent Student Writers Can Reach a Bigger Audience

The obvious way that students can reach a bigger audience is to maintain their own personal blogs that they share with their family and friends. Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Edublogs, are easy to use blogging tools that students can set up in minutes. Which platform students choose to use for their personal blogs isn't terribly important. What is important is that if they're serious about writing they keep writing and they may slowly grow an audience. To encourage the student in the story above, I shared the story of Chris Guillebeau's 279 Days to Overnight Success. 

Teen Ink provides a forum for students to post their writings, get feedback from peers on their reading, and read the writing of other teens. Submissions on Teen Ink that are really outstanding are considered for inclusion in Teen Ink's print publications.

Ink Pop is a site similar to Teen Ink that provides a place for teens to share their writings with each other. Teens can create profiles on Ink Pop and interact with each other. Ink Pop also offers writing contests for its members.