Showing posts with label teaching writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching writing. Show all posts

Monday, April 8, 2019

The Most Dangerous Writing App - Great for Jumpstarting Creative Writing

The Most Dangerous Writing App is a free service that is designed to force you to write without stopping for a preset amount of time. You can set your writing timer for as few as three minutes or as many as many as sixty minutes. If you stop writing before the minimum time has been reached, all of your writing is deleted. Once you have reached the minimum time you can keep writing or you can download your writing as a plain text file.

The Most Dangerous Writing App can also be used with a minimum word count. The same concept as the timer mode applies to the word count mode. If you stop writing before your word count is reached, your work disappears.

While you are writing on the The Most Dangerous Writing App you will see a progress meter across the top of the screen. If you stop writing for more than a few seconds you will see the screen start to turn red. When you have stopped writing for six seconds you'll see a "you failed" message and your work is erased.

Applications for Education
The Most Dangerous Writing App doesn't require any kind of registration. In fact, you can't register on the site. Simply go to the site, set a timer, and start writing. That ease of use makes it a good service for students to use to free-write for three, five, ten, or more minutes.

I can see having students use The Most Dangerous Writing App to jumpstart the brainstorming process for creative writing. You might give students some suggested topics to help them get start and then tell them to write for three minutes about one of those topics. Or challenge your students to include a handful of vocabulary words in their three minute writing blocks.

Your students can share the plain text files that The Most Dangerous Writing App generates for them via email, Google Classroom, OneNote, Google Drive, or any number of other file sharing services. If you and your students use G Suite for Education, have them upload their plain text files to Google Drive to have them automatically converted into Google Docs format to utilize the editing tools in Google Docs.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Compare & Contrast Map - A Writing Template

Read Write Think is a good source of interactive writing templates. I've previously featured a handful of their templates including this one and this one. Today, I would like to draw your attention to Read Write Think's Compare & Contrast Map.

The Compare & Contrast Map is a template for creating a comparative essay. Using the template students are guided through writing three styles of comparison essays. To get started students identify two things that they wish to compare and or contrast. Then they choose if they want to write a "whole to whole" essay, a "similarities to differences" essay, or a "point to point" essay. Whichever essay type they choose, students are guided through the types of information they should put in each part of their essays. When their essays are complete students can share them via email or print them.

Applications for Education
For younger students who need help formatting an essay, the Read Write Think templates can be very helpful.   If you haven't spent much time exploring the resources on Read Write Think's classroom resources page, I encourage you to do so.