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.
