Think Visually

If you are anything like me it is hard to get your students to plan their writing.  They never know what to write about or they "can't think of anything".  Now you can use the computer to your advantage to help your students become better writers.  Webspiration is an online tool that will help your students map out ideas, organize with outlines or even collaborate with each other.  Once you create a free account on Webspiration you have the ability to do all of the above as well as much more.  With Webspiration you can quickly create a map of what you are thinking about as a class.  You can now leave that up for the students to see or you can print it off so that all of the students have the ideas in front of them.  This program also gives you the ability to take a map of their thoughts and quickly organize it as an outline.  You can quickly add pictures to your maps as well as multiple shapes and colors that will help with the organization process.  Once you are finished with your map you can save it so that you can come back to it at a later time.  This will most definitely help your students learn to organize their writing in a fun and creative way.