Are you looking for writing apps,
tools, and resources that you can use with your students? If so, we have you
covered. Check out our list below. Let us know if there are any that we missed.
ABA
English– ABA English is designed to help you become a good
listener, speaker, reader, and writer of the English Language. The goal is to
help you learn English naturally—first, by listening and comprehending, then,
by speaking like native English speakers, and eventually, by writing in English
using its syntactic rules. Each part begins with a video portraying everyday
situation followed by an array of activities tailored from the content of the
video.
Bookopolis
Book Search– This is a social network for young readers with a
built-in book discovery feature. Teachers can use this platform to build a
society of readers and writers from their classes. Students can partake in book
reviews and critical thinking to develop opinion writing. Teachers can track
and critique a student’s work. The BookQuest option is useful for finding new
book reading suggestions.
BoomWriter–
A platform that encourages students to produce their best creative writing
efforts. BoomWriter provides a competitive platform that can be easily
incorporated into the syllabus using its unique mix of creative writing and
social media tech. It provides a symbiotic experience for all parties involved.
BoomWriter is available for teachers and students all around the world.
Crazy
Cursive Letters Joined Up Writing–
This app is ideal for helping children learn new languages. It uses merged
words to form new words. For every four words written accurately, a new fun
character is unlocked. You can add the top 100 words or your own words.
Cursive
Writing
WizardHandwriting
Practice– Kids learn how to trace using animated emojis with
enticing tones. Once the child masters tracing, four interactive games open
where they interact with letters. This app can be personalized to meet the
needs of every child, and it monitors the child’s progress.
Dexteria–
Dexteria offers therapeutic exercises developed to improve fine motor skills
and handwriting in kids and adults. It can also be used to build strength and
improve motor control. For best results, the exercises should be done regularly
in small sessions. Dexteria is also designed with automatic tracker and
self-reporting feature so that parents, teachers, and therapists can monitor
both compliance and progress
EssayJack–
EssayJack is a web-based tool to help students who need to divide essay writing
into smaller, more manageable segments. EssayJack comes with writing guides
such as text boxes, interactive tips, and prompts, split-screen composing, and
a live word count. These features help relieve the stress of writing and format
structures on students, thereby making them more efficient.
Ginger Page– Ginger Page was developed
with dyslexic students who often have problems with spelling. Ginger Page helps
dyslexic students learn better ways of writing English. With practice, students
learn to use Ginger page’s powerful editing tools to review their text for
errors, make corrections, and compose a top-notch text that conveys their
message every time they write.
Grammarly–
Grammarly is your personal grammar coach and an automated proofreader that helps
students get better in the proper use of grammar and gain confidence in their
writing ability. Grammarly helps correct about 10 times more mistakes than
common word processors, and it corrects more than 150 types of grammatical
errors and does a plagiarism check.
Handwriting
Heroes– As the name
implies, Handwriting Heroes is a perfect, multisensory program that helps kids
get a strong foundation for writing fluently and legibly. Through music,
stories, and animation, your kids will learn the formation of lowercase letters
and be able to explain why they are formed that way. The app comes with three
levels of difficulty to entertain and educate elementary school kids of
different abilities.
Handwriting Without Tears: Wet-Dry-Try– This app
allows students to practice writing letters and numbers on a virtual
chalkboard. Kids learn correct ways of writing numbers, lowercase letters, and
capitals while practicing along. Kids can learn handwriting skills most
productively and easily through the simulation of Blackboard and Slate
Chalkboard with Double Line.
HelpKidzLearn–
HelpKidzLearn is a group of software for young children and those with learning
challenges to play online. This software is divided into five sections: Early
Years, Games and Quizzes, Stories and Songs, Creative Play, and Find Out About.
You will get the best out of these activities if you play them with your child.
Always use them as a focus of discussion. Speaking and listening are very
crucial for young children’s educational development, particularly reading and
writing.
Jumbled
Sentences– The Jumbled Sentences series is developed for
beginners to perfect their writing skills. It provides beginners with a simple,
interactive, and interesting way of learning word order. How do you play the
game? Enter the parts to create a sentence, click on OK to check whether your
answer is right, and you’ll earn one coin for every correct answer. Play as
fast as possible to enter the next level. Collect as many coins as possible to
get more hints and stickers.
Kids Academy– With Kids Academy, your kids
will learn to write letters and develop handwriting skills in a very
interesting way. The app helps students to learn while playing a game that uses
a proven multisensory approach to teach children how to lowercase and uppercase
letters. Kids are guided by arrows and dotted lines through the letter tracing
process.
Little Bird
Tales– Little Bird Tales helps young children create and design
stories with their own voice, art, and imagination. Budding artists will find
that there is no end to the stories and worlds they can create as they build
their creativity, writing, and reading skills. Reading and writing will be your
child’s new favorite hobbies after they see how much fun they can have with
Little Bird Tales. With no ads or popups, Little Bird Tales is a free app that
allows children to easily share their creations with family and friends.
MaxScholar
– MaxScholar is a learning platform designed for students with learning
disabilities such as dyslexia, ADHD, processing problems, and general
difficulty reading. The platform is built as a digitally blended learning
environment for developing reading, writing, and comprehension skills. It also
teaches math skills with the use of customized software and engaging materials.
Microsoft
Learning Tools– The Microsoft Learning Tools app is built-in
extension tools that can be used to aid in writing and reading. This app is
intended for all types of people, whether young or old, high or low learning
skills. All the tools are designed with a complex function that is easy to use.
These tools are all available in Office 365 products on Windows, Mac, iPad,
Microsoft Edge browser, and so on. They are guaranteed to help with reading,
writing, and comprehension, and they all are free.
Newsela– Newsela provides a personalized
approach to learning, using different assessments, annotated documents, and
writing prompts throughout. This approach can be applied to different subjects
because of their adaptive readability. Teachers can easily access learning
analytics to assess the level of each student’s progression and task
completion.
Penzu
Classroom– This is a platform that helps young writers and
teachers in their job. Penzu classroom covers all classes of writers, no matter
what type of writing they do. Whether it’s helping with your diary or journal,
keeping track of a diet, or a pregnancy journal, Penzu has something for you.
It has all the resources you need to preserve your ideas and develop rather
than wasting valuable time writing it. You can also become one of 2 million
happy users of this platform from around the globe.
PlagTracker–
A plagiarism checker benefits teachers, students, website owners, and anyone
who has an interest in protecting their content. PlagTracker is plagiarism
software that checks to make sure that your work is sufficiently unique and
that your writing is original.
Quill– Quill is a writing tutorial app for
teachers designed to help students become better writers. Quill is a nonprofit
organization, and its goal is to provide tools such as Quill to help make
students better writers. Quill uses web applications to create engaging content
for students that helps them learn grammar, writing skills, and vocabulary.
Using the teacher dashboard, you can monitor students’ progress according to
the Common Core Standards; this feature also makes grading more intuitive and
meaningful.
Redbird Language Arts & Writing – Redbird
Language Arts & Writing provides students in grades 2-7 with a
personalized language arts and writing learning path by leveraging adaptive
instruction and practice. This allows the platform to deliver precisely what
each student needs to become a fluent writer and master communicator. Each
grade level of material contains 9–10 units that focus on a writing or reading
skill. The architecture of each lesson was developed to provide students with
instruction and practice on reading, parts of speech, paragraph analysis,
sentence composition, and sentence structures. All lessons cover new concepts
or provide practice with concepts that have already been introduced. In our
highly competitive economy, employers seek candidates that have strong written
communication skills. Although educators know that mastering language arts and
writing is essential for future success in college and the workplace, a
troubling number of students across K-12 struggle with acquiring these vital
skills.
Redbird Language Arts & Writing-After demoing this product, I was
impressed by its nuances and advanced features, which work together to help
students develop superior written communication skills. I wholeheartedly
recommend this platform to all classroom teachers, administrators, math
coaches, etc. who are striving to increase their student’s language and writing
skills. You won’t be disappointed.
Shake-a-Phrase:
Fun with Words and Sentences– This exciting language learning
app provides creative writing prompts, vocabulary, and parts of speech
practice. It provides a blend of education and entertainment in class or
on-the-go. It has over 2,000 words and definitions in five interactive themes for
children aged eight and above. This app provides a new random sentence every
time you shake your device, giving you more words to learn. Test your abilities
with adjectives, verbs, nouns, prepositions, and conjunctions.
Speare.com –
Speare.com bills itself as a “thought processor.” Their goal is to make writing
as easy and flexible as thinking. With Speare.com, your thoughts are turned
into building blocks that can be sorted, ordered, divided, and snapped back
together in any sequence. You can easily order your thought building blocks
into paragraphs, chapters, and complete documents with a simple finger swipe or
click of a mouse. With a speech-to-text option, thinking out loud can suddenly
become the beginnings of an essay or book. Ideal for students that needs
additional help writing, Speare.com can also be used as an alternative method
to take notes or brainstorm in any classroom.
Storybird –
An online writing platform that allows students at any level to find
inspiration, write, read other’s writing, and receive feedback. Storybird has
thousands of images to prompt students’ creativity and get them writing poems,
long-form stories, short 500-word “flash fiction,” comics, and even picture
books. With hundreds of writing prompts, lessons, video tutorials, and quizzes,
teachers can assign work in class or use Storybird for homework or classroom
extension projects.
Strip
Designer – Strip Designer
allows students to create their own personal comic books from personal or
classroom photos. With more than 100 included templates, students insert their
photos, add filters, text balloons, word stickers like “BANG” or “POW,” and
even draw directly on their comic strips within the app. Once students have
completed their comic strips, the files are easy to share via email, Facebook,
Twitter, or save as a PDF. Strip Designer can be used as an engagement tool in
literacy class for writing hesitant students, to create final projects across
any subject, or as a fun reward.
StudySync – StudySync offers a comprehensive,
technology-driven English Language Arts curriculum for grades 6-12. The
curriculum integrates reading and writing with embedded skill lessons to build
foundational knowledge and improve critical thinking, comprehension, and
inquiry skills. Teachers have the option to use StudySync as a completely
digital curriculum or turn to the printable options. With the belief that all
students deserve equal access to education, StudySync offers tons of
differentiation options for various student needs, including English Language
Learner segments, extensive use of video and audio components, and repeated
readings. Extended writing projects use explicit instruction along with self,
peer, and teacher assessment to encourage deep understanding and future skill
application.
TurnItIn for
Educators – TurnItIn for Educators is a website that helps
support academic integrity in schools. Teachers can detect plagiarized content
with the world’s most effective plagiarism detection software. Using forensic
linguistic analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP), TurnItIn can
determine if students are writing their own papers or using a third party. The
website also provides professional development resources for teachers to
improve the feedback they provide for students and lesson plans to use with
students to build integrity skills.
Virtual Writing Tutor
– This website is a free grammar and essay checker that also proofreads your
work. Simply copy and paste your writing into the text box and click a button.
Virtual Writing Tutor can also provide word counts, calculate average sentence
length, and assess word choice. The website does not automatically correct
errors. Instead, students must review a list of suggested errors and make the
corrections themselves. This forces students to think about the errors they are
making, and over time, can improve their writing. The Virtual Writing Tutor
also offers an error correction game for students to practice finding and
correcting common English language errors and has a portal for teachers to set
up pen pal exchanges.
Whooo’s
Reading – The goal of Whooo’s Reading is accelerated reading
comprehension and improved writing skills. By using open-ended questions
instead of the standard true/false and multiple-choice style, students are
required to think independently about texts. The Whooo’s Reading program
automatically reminds students to improve their writing by asking them to cite
evidence or answer all the parts of a question. Teachers can monitor student’s
reading with automatic quiz results, graded by the Whooo’s Reading app,
available in the teacher dashboard. To increase student motivation, students
earn Wisdom Coins for reading and writing. These can be spent on accessories
and items for their Owlvatars (owl avatars).
Word Hippo
– Word Hippo is a one-stop website for all your word needs. It includes a
dictionary, thesaurus, synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, example sentences,
translations into over 80 languages, the ability to find words of different
lengths based on specific letters or blends, the ability to find words in
different forms (plural, past tense, present tense, etc.), and the ability to
hear pronunciations. Word Hippo is particularly useful for ELL students, during
writing or literacy classes, or while playing a Scrabble-type game.
Writing Challenge – Turn freewriting into a game
with the Writing Challenge app. Helpful for students that struggle to free
write or waste valuable literacy time trying to think of a topic, the Writing
Challenge offers a set of prompts and allows the student to select the one they
want. Then, every minute (or longer if the app settings are changed), it offers
additional prompts to further the student’s writing, such as adding new
characters, words, places, or actions. The best way to improve writing is to
practice, and for students that struggle to practice independently, the Writing
Challenge can decrease writing anxiety and help deal with the fear of the
“blank page.”
Writing Prompts – Writing Prompts uses current
events, random words, scenes, sketches, genres, and text to provide hundreds of
writing prompts for whole class or individual student use. Simply swipe through
the available prompts until one strikes your fancy or save favorite prompts in
a favorites folder for easy access later. With additional packs of prompts
available for purchase, there are millions of prompt possibilities so students
will never run out of things to write about.