Googley Poetry Projects and Tools

April is the time of year

For kids to write a poem.
There's loads of fun activities
Here for you to show 'em.

Google tools can be used
To make the perfect rhyme,
With templates, tools, and writing prompts
To save your students time.

Draggable Drawings, random Sheets,
And Google Docs highlighting
Will give your students inspiration
For their creative writing.

So look below to find out more,
Then get your students on it,
Writing their ode, haiku, free verse,
Their ballad or their sonnet.

EnlightenAI - Your New T.A. for Grading and Feedback

I recently recorded a webinar about one of my favorite AI tools for education - EnlightenAI. (Disclosure - EnlightenAI sponsored this webinar, but all opinions were my own.)

If you are not familiar with it, EnlightenAI is an AI-powered tool that works hand-in-hand with a teacher to assist in guided grading and personalized feedback for student writing.

Here are a few key aspects of how EnlightenAI works:

• You can pull in writing assignments from a wide range of sources (Google Classroom, Illuminate, Canvas, Form, Docs, and more)
• You can provide the AI with your rubric, the assignment prompt and materials, exemplars, guiding instructions, and more.
• The AI will use that information to provide grades and feedback for student writing.
• You can override any grade and customize any feedback which will train the AI even more to learn your style and grading requirements.
• The AI will provide insights into strengths and weaknesses for every student, as well as customized lessons and activities to help address those.
• The AI can also provide instant writing feedback directly to students while they are writing to support revision during the writing process.

And all of this comes in a robust free version! To learn all about EnlightenAI, see below to watch my recorded 1-hour webinar and to access the resources from the session.

Give Your Students a Voice - Be An Author Month 2025

This blog post is sponsored by Book Creator, but all opinions are mine.

Book Creator has long been one of my favorite EdTech tools, providing students with both the inspiration and the tools to tell stories, share their ideas, and let their voices be heard.

I have often shared about Book Creator, including how this tool can be used to help students write and illustrate their stories. For more details on that, see my earlier blog post and tutorial video here - "Book Creator Pen Tools - Let Your Inner Illustrator Come Alive!"

Well March is "Be An Author Month" and Book Creator is helping to celebrate it through activities, webinars, templates, and a personal narrative competition for all students.

Writing is a passion of mine, including this blog, my "Control Alt Achieve" book, my poetry for kids, my essays on wellbeing, and more. I am so excited for resources that support and inspire students to write.

See below for all the details on how you can access these free resources and engage your students in the writing activities.

Recorded Webinar - Storytelling Activities with Google Tools

I recently had the pleasure to present sessions at the High Impact Conference for Educators, which is an event we put on through the Educational Service Center where I work. All of my sessions were recorded, and over time I hope to share several of the videos.

Please note that the recordings are a lot more casual than some of my other videos, as this is from an in-person conference with a room full of attendees, so there is some chatting and questions and such. Hopefully though you will still find the content helpful.

For this recording, this is the session:

Once Upon a Google: Innovative Storytelling with Google Tools

Google tools provide many ways for students and educators to create and share stories. Slides can be used to create storybooks, e-books, comic strips, stop-motion animation, and story soundboards; Docs can be used for "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories, emoji rebus stories, and black-out poetry; Sheets can be used to create random writing prompts for inspiration, and more!

See below for the full recording, as well as the resources from the session. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, feedback, or suggestions you have on this topic.

National Poetry Month Competition and Resources

April is the time of year

For kids to write a poem.

There's loads of fun activities
Here for you to show 'em.

Technology can be used
To make the perfect rhyme,
With templates, tools, and writing prompts
To save your students time.

Draggable Drawings, random Sheets,
And Google Docs highlighting
Will give your students inspiration
For their creative writing.

So look below to find out more,
Then get your students on it,
Writing their ode, haiku, free verse,
Their ballad or their sonnet.

Book Creator Pen Tools - Let Your Inner Illustrator Come Alive!

Book Creator is a fantastic tool for students and teachers to create and share digital books. Not only does it help you write a book, it also makes it super easy to illustrate your creation.

Book Creator has a powerful pen tool that includes:

• a marker, paint brush, crayon, and highlighter to draw and write with
• the magic ink option to draw, write, and fill with colorful patterns
• a fill tool to color items in with colors or patterns
• an emoji tool to search, find and insert emojis
• and (best of all) the AutoDraw tool

These simple but powerful tools can bring out the inner illustrator in any student, and help them make a colorful and engaging book.

See below for a tutorial video and written directions on how these tools work. And thanks to Book Creator for sponsoring this post and video! All opinions expressed are based on my personal view.

Creative Writing and Publishing Resources for You and Your Students

Around 20 years ago, my daughter and I used to do poetry nights where we would use a website (Watch Out for Snakes) that would randomly create titles for us by putting together adjectives and nouns. We would then challenge each other to write a poem based on one of the prompts, followed by reading our new creations.

Yes, I have always been a nerd.

Over the years, writing has continued to be a big part of our lives, and I have posted many poetry-related and creative writing tools and activities to my blog.

Likewise my daughter has continued to write including two children's books. In 2021 she released "Red the Raccoon Weathers the Storm" and now in 2022 she has just put out "This Book Is A Little Bit Cheesy".

To help encourage and support you and your students, see below for my resources on creative writing and poetry, as well as ideas for sharing and publishing writing from you and your students. Also as an example of using technology for writing and publishing, see the details on the wonderful new book from my daughter that's perfect for the cheese-loving kids in your classroom or family.

Docs Rocks! 8 Engaging Activities for Google Docs

Google Docs is a wonderful word processor, but is much more than just that!

Although we can certainly use it to type up a report, take notes, or write an article, we can also get creative with the features and functions built into the program to make some fun learning activities.

Recently I did a video training webinar where I took a look at eight creative ways to use regular Google Docs features in new fun ways to practice and develop literacy skills. These include:

🟨 Highlighting for summarization

⬛ Creating blackout poetry

😀 Emojis for writing and summarizing

📘 Cloze reading activities

🐉 Making "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories

💡 Prewriting with embedded graphic organizers

✍️ Writing less to write better

⌨️ Generating punctuation practice

See below for the recorded training video, as well as resources, ideas, and templates for each of the activities.

Improve Student Writing with Wordtune

As we all know, "Good writing is about finding the best words to convey your message."

Or should I say, "The best writing is choosing the most appropriate words to express one's thoughts."

Or perhaps just, "To write well, you need to use the right words."

Whatever the case, when we or our students are writing, we want to find the best tools to help us reflect on, edit, re-edit, and ultimately improve our writing. 

I can remember using a giant thesaurus over thirty years ago to help find just the right word for my schoolwork. Now though we have so many other tools to assist, including an excellent resource I came across recently called Wordtune.

Wordtune is a free Chrome extension that uses artificial intelligence to suggest alternate ways to phrase your writing. This can be helpful for students to add variety to their writing, try to incorporate new words, and tune up a sentence to make it more clear.

See below for a short video on how to use this tool, as well as detailed written instructions.

Write Better with Writer's Highlighter Add-on for Docs

Writing is a process, not a one-and-done event. When a student is writing their first draft, it is important that they simply get their ideas out, mistakes and all. After that brain dump, now comes the work of editing and revising.

This is summed up beautifully in the following quote:

"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke." - Arthur Plotnik

There are many tools and techniques available to assist with the editing process. A while back I covered many such resources in my blog post "Self-Editing Tools for Student Writing in Google Docs". Recently I came across a new add-on for Google Docs that deserves to be added on to this list.

The tool is a free add-on called "Writer's Highlighter". It can be used in several ways, but the main focus is to highlight words in your document that match a customized list. For example, these could include overused words or phrases, including "very", "really", "stuff", and more. The add-on can also color-code your sentences based on their lengths.

See below for more details and directions on how to use this very useful tool. Or, rather I mean "this helpful tool".

10 Writing Prompt Tools for Creative Inspiration

I love writing… blog posts, stories, poems, and more. As much as I love it though, writing can be a challenge. Often one of the most difficult parts is just getting started. Sometimes we just need a little inspiration, a jump start to get us thinking down a new path.

When my daughter was younger we used to do poetry nights where we would use a website (Watch Out for Snakes) that would randomly create titles for us by putting together adjectives and nouns. We would then challenge each other to write a poem based on one of the prompts, followed by reading our new creations. Yes, I have always been a nerd.

Just like those random titles inspired me to compose poems, such tools can help our students when they need to write a journal entry, short story, essay, article, poem, or such. Thankfully there are many resources available to use for writing prompts, story starters, and other writing inspiration. In this blog post we will take a look at 10 example tools to use in your class.

By the way, if you are interested to see some examples of what came out of my poetry nights, feel free to check out Elemental Love, Moonstruck Conifer, and Smallest Pony.

Create Halloween Rebus Stories with Emojis and Google Docs

In earlier posts I have shared Google Docs templates for creating Emoji Rebus Stories for both Wintertime and Valentine's Day. With Fall coming soon, I have put together a Halloween-themed version.

Anyone who grew up reading Highlights magazine in the dentist waiting room will quickly recognize a rebus. Basically it is a story where some of the words are replaced by images. This can be a fun activity for students, both to create and to read. It may even help with younger students who are not proficient at spelling but can choose the image for the word they want.

See below to get a copy of the template, as well as detailed directions for how to use it.

Create Your Own Story Cubes with Google Drawings

Story cubes have long been a popular item to give inspiration for writing. Typically they are regular cubes with a different picture or word on each face. Students can pick a few cubes and then roll them to randomly get elements for a story.

Although you can certainly buy these cubes, you can also make you own. Better yet, students can each make several story cubes and then you will have dozens and dozens to use from your class.

One easy way to make your own story cubes is to use Google Drawings with pictures, emojis, or text. See below to get copies of my Google Drawings Story Cube templates, along with detailed directions on how you and your students can make these.

Googley Poem Projects for National Poetry Month (or any time of year)

April is the time of year

For kids to write a poem.
There's loads of fun activities
Here for you to show 'em.

Google tools can be used
To make the perfect rhyme,
With templates, tools, and writing prompts
To save your students time.

Draggable Drawings, random Sheets,
And Google Docs highlighting
Will give your students inspiration
For their creative writing.

So look below to find out more,
Then get your students on it,
Writing their ode, haiku, free verse,
Their ballad or their sonnet.

3 Googley Valentines Activities for Kids

With Valentine's Day coming up, this is a great time to highlight some activities I really love! In this case I am talking about technology activities for students that tie into the holiday theme while also promoting creativity and writing.

I this blog post I will be sharing three Valentine-themed projects that use Google tools. Two of them are ideas I have shared in the past, and one of them is new twist on an old idea for this post. Hopefully you find all of them to be fun ways to engage your students, while working on practical skills.

See below for a description of each activity, access to all the templates, and links to the original blog posts for the projects I am re-sharing. Hope you love them!

Write Right with Google Tools

Writing is a skill that crosses all subject areas and all grade levels. No matter what you teach, it is critical for your students to be able to express their ideas clearly when writing.

There are a multitude of ways for students to improve their writing, including many technology tools that come from Google or that work with G Suite. With these technology tools, the writing process can be improved at all stages from planning to writing to self editing to peer editing to assessment to revising to publishing.

Over the years I have done many blog posts on tech tools for the various stages of the writing process. To make it more convenient, I have pulled together all of those different resources into this one post. See below for an overview of Google tools that can be used to help students and teachers through the writing process.

For each portion of the writing process I have listed some key resources and ideas, but have also linked to my earlier blog posts for each. Be sure to click the links for the related blog posts in each section to get all of the directions, examples, and resources for each.

Googley Wintertime Activities for Kids

[Updated as of December 2022]

As we get closer to the holiday break, it is expected and understandable that our students start getting a little distracted. They are looking forward to lots of days off, holiday celebrations, gifts, and more. Let's be honest … we may be a little distracted as well.

 
This is a time of year when we look for some fun activities to keep our students focused and active. But we don't just want busy work. If possible it is great to find projects that are fun, tie into wintertime themes, and still provide our students with a chance to be creative, write, or improve some content area skills.

To help out with that, I have put together eight wintertime-themed activities that use free Google tools, including Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings:

⛄ Activity #1 - Build a Snowman with Google Slides

🎄 Activity #2 - Decorate a Holiday Tree with Google Slides

🧲 Activity #3 - Wintertime Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings

📬 Activity #4 - Holiday Greeting Cards with Google Drawings

🎁 Activity #5 - "12 Days of Christmas" Guided Google Sheets Math Activity

🌟 Activity #6 - Pixel Art Ornaments with Google Sheets

❄️ Activity #7 - Wintertime Emoji Rebus Stories with Google Docs

💡 Activity #8 - Holiday Lights Writing with Google Docs

Some of these are projects I have shared in the past, while others are new twists on previous posts. Hopefully some of these will be a good match for your students to keep them busy AND learning as we head into the holidays.

Build a Jack-O-Lantern with Google Slides

A few years ago I created my "Build a Jack-O-Lantern" activity for Google Slides. It was a giant hit with students as it let them be creative while improving their writing skills and tech skills.

With Fall here once again, I decided to revisit this favorite activity and add a new twist to it. In the years since I first created this project, we now have an amazing new tool in the Chrome Web Extension called Mote.

Mote is a free tool that makes it easy for you and your students to record your voice and add it directly into your slideshow (or document, form, email, and so much more). With Mote we can make this activity even more engaging than ever.

• You can use Mote to add audio support to the activity by recording directions and embedding them right into the slideshow.
• Your students can use Mote to record themselves reading aloud the Jack-O-Lantern story they write, and embed their narrated story into their slide.
• And the students can record themselves making spooky sound effects or speaking for their pumpkin.

I had the pleasure of recording a video with Jon Neale and Sue Tranchina for their pop-up Mote PD series. See below for the short video explaining how your students can do the "Build a Jack-O-Lantern" activity with Google Slides and Mote, as well as detailed written directions.

Create "Pi Poems" with Google Sheets

A poem can take on many different forms: sonnet, limerick, haiku, free verse, acrostic, and more. One fun form of poetry that mixes writing and math is the "Pi Poem".

A "Pi Poem" is composed of words where the length of each word is equal to each digit of pi in order. So for example, the beginning of the poem would be made of a 3-letter word, 1-letter word, 4-letter word, 1-letter word, and 5-letter word, for the beginning of pi which starts as 3.1415. Punctuation doesn't count.

This fun student writing activity could plug into the school year in several places:

• During your poetry unit
• National Poetry Month in April
• When working on vocabulary skills, especially synonyms
• When teaching about pi in math class
• For "Pi Day" each year on March 14th
• Anytime you are looking for a fun cross-curriculum activity for math and ELA

To help with this activity, I have created a Google Sheets "Pi Poem" template. The template makes it easier to create your poem with helpful boxes for each letter of each word. See below to get your own copy of the template, directions for use, some other helpful tech hints for the project, and a sample finished product.

Using Named Versions in Docs to Track Writing Drafts

Writing is a process. You are never really done. You are just at your current version of whatever you are working on.

This is also true for students and the writing they do in school. At least it should be true. Students should not just write their essay, paper, report, or story once, then turn it in and be finished with it. A critical part of writing is getting feedback, making changes, adding new content, and trimming out what is not needed. And then doing it again. And again.

Thankfully Google Docs has always made it easy for students to write, and then for teachers and peers to leave feedback (text, voice, video, and handwritten), and then for students to make changes to their work.

Now though, it is even easier for teachers and students to keep track of those big mile markers when a paper goes from rough draft to revised draft to final copy. Recently Google gave Revision History a face lift, renaming it to Version History and adding the new ability to name specific versions.

See below how this new process works, and how you and your students can use this to improve the clarity of the editing process.