Maine Learning Technology Initiative

Thanks to everyone who attended our first webinar yesterday. I had a great time talking to Jill about prewriting activities and the participants added some great ideas and resources. As promised, here are the links from my slides and a collection that was harvested from the backchannel chat in both sessions.

Writing Prompts

• Writer’s Digest Writing Prompts
• Can Teach
• Writing Fix
• Creative Writing Prompts
• Creativity Portal

Image Collections for Prompts or Visual Synectics

• Flickr
• LIFE Photo Archive
• NYT News Snapshot
• NASA Images
• MARVEL
• Maine Memory Network
• Windows on Maine

Digital Timer (for Quick Write)

• Chimoo Timer

Resources and Ideas from Participants

• Book: Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones
• The Big Picture
• saving interesting titles from newspapers (ones that don’t give away the article) and the kids love creating the news stories from the title.
• buy art books on sale and use photos of painting, sculptures, etc. as writing prompts
• Morgue File
• Geography Photo of the Day
• Smithsonian Images
• Use photo layers in GoogleEarth
• Research on effects of laptops on writing
• Bean – free word processing program
• add an index section in NoteShare notebook to look at words
• Wordle
• ABC Brainstorming for Math
• Weaving a story from beginning to end using iPhoto images as a guide
• Providing opening sentence
• What happens next? Showing a short video clip, getting kids to carry on the story
• Students in ECS create a Discovery Portfolio all about them with music added
• PB Wiki where students respond to a reading
• American Memory collection at Library of Congress
• Image Detective
• Pics4Learning (Kids can submit their photos)
• Glogster
• Kids build blogs in ePals
• Blogspot and Photo Bucket
• Quick Writes successful with LD middle school kids
• Modeling with projector
• Highlighting best ideas, sentences or phrases in a Quick Write
• Free Rice (vocabulary)
• Word Banks as eBulletin in Studywiz
• Writing Prompts for Math