Happy Friday!
I am so excited for you to read the second guest post presented by Teaching with Technology. Online tutor, Robert Morris, has created a list of great tools to help teachers teach the writing process.
Without further adieu…
Online Tools that Help Teachers Teach Essay Writing as a Process
When you expect your students to complete essays and other types of papers, you have a responsibility to guide
them through the different stages of the process until they become a natural part of their routines. Many educators
neglect this duty and leave their students with an impossible burden.
If you are wondering how you can help your students improve their essay writing skills, you should consider
breaking up the process in different stages. There are online tools that will support you along the way.
I. Pre-Writing Stage
Before your students can start working on their assignments, they need to come up with a plan. The following tools will stimulate the process of brainstorming and outlining:
1. Imagination Prompt Generator provides random writing prompts that can get the writers’ creative juices flowing. You don’t have to assign specific topics all the time; enable your students to take some inspiration from this tool once in a while.
2. Storybird is a digital storytelling platform. Before you ask your students to write an actual essay, you should allow them to go through the inspiring stage of storytelling. Then, they can use that visual story as a base for their papers.
3. Mind42 is a simple, fast, and free mind mapping tool that will make the stage of brainstorming more productive. Most of your students are inspired by visual content, so they will get better ideas if you encourage them to create their own mind maps.
4. Bubbl.us is another brainstorming and mind mapping tool, which is especially appealing to younger students. They can create colorful mind maps and share them with the class to get feedback and more
II. Writing and Editing Stage
Once your students have a strong base of ideas, they are ready to tackle the writing process. Of course, they will still need your guidance, so you can suggest some of the most effective tools they can use for inspiration, writing
1. Write My Essay is a tool that can help you bring the process of academic writing closer to your students. You can get a paper written by a professional author and show it as an exemplar model of the structure each writer should aim for.
2. Google Docs is an effective writing platform that will prevent cases of lost content. Your students will forget to save the text continuously on MS Word, so they can easily end up with a deleted document after hours of hard work. If they write on Google Docs, their papers will be saved automatically.
3. TitanPad is a collaborative platform that makes team projects more fun than ever. The members of the team can work on a single document simultaneously and benefit from each other’s ideas. The contributions of all authors will be recognizable with distinctive highlights.
III. Tools for sharing and editing
Once the paper has shape, your students may lack the confidence to submit it for grading. If you inspire them to share the content online, they will be motivated by getting feedback from the classmates and other readers, so the entire process will become less frightening. These are the tools you can recommend for such purpose:
1. Slideshare is a growing community of people who decide to get their projects published online. If your students turned the content of their essays into slideshows, this is the platform they can use for simple
2. Scribd is a huge source of inspiration for writing. Your students can become part of the community if they start sharing their work on this platform. Scribd can get those papers distributed to a large audience.
3. ISSUU is another platform where your students can publish their slideshows, documents, and even eBooks for free. The tool also provides the users with statistics about how many people viewed and shared
Remember: there is always room for exploring your options further. The tools provided above will help you explain the different stages of essay writing and enable your students to go through them with ease.
Robert Morris is an online tutor, educator and writer. Loves everything EdTech. Follow Robert on Google+!
Thanks for reading!
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