TikaTok

TikaTok is an online site that helps students imagine a story and create a book. The site includes a wonderful tutorial which explains the process of writing, illustrating, and publishing their book. Students can share their books with their classmates online, or they can choose to purchase a hard or softcover book.

Visit http://tikatok.com/ to get started! Click on the "take a quick video tour" link on the right-side of the site for complete details. Also, take a look at the Tikatok Blog: Uncommon Brainstorming Ideas, Part I - http://nightly.tikatok.net/2008/writables-uncommon-brainstorming-activities-part-1/. Here, you and your students will find uncommon brainstorming ideas to spark creativity and get the story ideas flowing.

The Writing Teacher

LearningExpress has created a new blog, called The Writing Teacher, for sharing ideas and expertise on helping students become better writers. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 33 percent of eighth grade students in the United States are writing at a proficient level. To help change that, The Writing Teacher includes writing input, content, and feedback--all encouraging participation by those who teach writing every day. The blog's debut article, "Research-Based Best Practices for Teaching Writing: A Discussion with Steve Graham," features advice from a literacy professor at Vanderbilt University.

If you teach writing, please add this resource to your writing toolkit!http://www.thewritingteacher.org/

Busy Teacher Cafe

The Busy Teacher Cafe site has lots of great resources for teachers. It is a K-6 site for busy teachers like you! You will find free printables, theme activities, teacher resources, K-6 web sites, sites for teachers, and a teacher blog. Check it out!

http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/index.htm

Online Scrapbooking!

I have just discovered Scrapblog. Scrapblog is a "free" web site that allows you to create on-line scrapbooks. You can journal, add pictures, add stamps, and more. Then, you can share your scrapblog virtually with friends and family or you can export pages as jpegs and have them printed to create a physical scrapbook, as well. They have all sorts of wonderful backgrounds, colors, stamps, clipart images, and more. You could spend HOURS on this site. It is just too much fun. So, if you enjoy scrapbooking or have always wanted to scrapbook but did not want to incur the expense or all of the supplies, books, etc. ... check out www.scrapblog.com. The picture on the left was created with scrapblog. Check it out! It is soooooo much fun!