Writing

**Writing Ideas, Skills and Interesting Links** ** Publishing **  Tikatok™ is where kids channel their imagination into stories – and publish those stories into books for you to share and treasure with friends and family. **Tikatok’s Classroom Program** is a unique literacy program that gets students excited about reading and writing. Students write and illustrate original stories and have them printed into professional quality books they can be proud of.

[|The Story Starter] The Story Starter provides 345,935,040 creative ideas for writers of all ages. All of the story starters are randomly generated. The story starters can be used for short stories, novels, plays, scripts, or just for fun.
 * Writing Prompts **
 * Click on one of the following links:**
 * Dictionaries and Thesauruses **

[|Big Huge Thesaurus]
is a must add to your classroom publishing center. The tag line of [|Big Huge Thesaurus]says it all: “synonyms, antonyms, and rhymes (oh my!)”. Big Huge Thesaurus goes beyond other online thesauruses by giving students a wealth of synonyms (for each part of speech), words that sound like the original word, and rhyming words. When students find a word that they are curious about, they can click the link and it will send that word through the Big Huge Thesaurus.

**Language Features**

[|PicLits] is an interesting website that aims to provide inspiration for writing short stories. [|PicLits] tries to accomplish this goal by providing users with images upon which they can build their writing. To get writers started, [|PicLits] provides a list of words which can be dragged and dropped into sentence form. If you don't need a word list, you can select the "freestyle" option to begin free-form writing. The idea of [|PicLits] is not to write a full story within the images, but rather to use the images as the inspiration for longer pieces. Users of [|PicLits] can create a free account in which to save their work. If you like short personal narratives, make sure you read the [|about page] on [|PicLits].
 * Writing With Images **


 * Lessons **

Writing Trait Lessons
Lessons, ideas for writing,


 * Graphic Organisers **

[|OpenZine: Create Online Magazines For Free]OpenZine lets you easily create online magazines without having any knowledge of web design or development. It is a WYSIWYG based service where you can create as well as publish a web magazine by inserting text, images and videos. Creating a magazine is simple, just choose from 10 different layouts and start adding content for different sections of the magazine like “Head feature”, “Main Feature” or “Sub Feature”. You can have multiple main features or sub features in your magazine. A rich text editor allows you to enter formatted text, links and images as part of your content. You can also create a cover page and add Issue title, Issue summary and Issue tags to make your magazine more professional and give it a proper flow.
 * Newspapers/Magazines **

Newspapers From Blogs Create a newspaper from your blog -**[|Instructions on how to do this are here]**

[|MagCloud]MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we'll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.


 * Miscelleneous **

== [|Essay map] is an intuitive online essay planner for students. Students do not to have sign up for an account or register an email address. They simply enter their first name and topic and away they go. Students can move between screens as their ideas develop and become clearer. The only downside is that essay maps cannot be saved. However, they can be printed out before exiting. ==

[|Writing Resources]
**Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites**
 * The internet catalogue for students, teachers, administrators & parents. ** Over 20,000 relevant links personally selected by an educator/author with over 30 years of experience.

So, you fancy yourself a writer, eh? You say you [|write for a living]? Then, why do you keep repeating the same words over and over again? Well, lets put an end to that! Maybe we can help you improve your [|writing skills] or at the very least show you a great new tool. A new website called [|www.VocabGrabber.com] is a great tool to help you see the errors of your ways in writing. This fresh, new service allows you to enter a block of text into a box and hit a button that says Grab Vocabulary. VocabGrabber analyzes your text and spits back a word cloud of terms used. From there, you can click on words and see synonyms as well as how many times you used a certain word.
 * [|**Voice Grabber**]**

[[image:stthomasenglish/home-01-02.gif width="167" height="94" caption="Story Arts Online" link="http://www.storyarts.org/"]]
Adventure Island is a web-based tool for classes, schools and groups to create an interactive online island that other people are able to visit and explore. You can **create descriptions** for each area of your island, and these can be **written in either the style of a story, diary, guide or game**, as you wish. You can include on your island areas that will trap an unsuspecting visitor, and force them to start again, as well as including four clues that, once found, will allow the visitor to escape from the island and get back to civilisation.

** Your writing partner, helping you write a story from start to end. ** == From Scholastic   ==
 * The Lightning Bug Teaching Portal audience includes teachers in primary and secondary schools, universities and home school educators. Heaps of ideas here - worth a look! **

[[image:stthomasenglish/rhymez.gif width="539" height="31"]]

 * Type in a word below to find its rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more **

==[|Writing Effective Paragraphs]==

=[|Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing]= Roy Peter Clark from Poynter Institute has posted up 50 tools that can help you when you do any kinds of writing. This is a extensive list of writing tools, but by no mean you need to apply all of them when you do any writing.

Interactives - Elements of a Story

[|Automatic Text Summariser]
Enter the text in the box provided and then give the number of sentences you want it summarised into.

[|Great Summary]
GreatSummary can summarize text from web pages or text pasted from another document.

[[image:stthomasenglish/sky_logo.png link="http://www.kidpub.com/page/welcome-kidpub-1"]]
[|**Telescopic Text**] An excellent visual tool for showing students how adding specific nouns etc adds interest to the sentence

 Writing Resources

PDFs for you to download