Hello everyone, my name is Heather Moorefield Lang and this is my YouTube channel tech 15. And today I'm going to be telling you about a useful writing tool called writing sparks. Writing sparks is a resource to be able to find writing prompts for both teachers and students. Ideas for creative writing, writing challenges and all sorts of locations and ideas to help students who might be struggling or just looking for ideas of ways to get started in writing. So let me quickly show you how this site works. First you want to go to writingsparks.com. And if you want to quickly look around, you'll see that you can create a spark if you're a teacher or you can write now if you're students. You can also get videos and information to further find out more about writing sparks. If you're a teacher and you click on create a spark, you can find out information for those under seven or eight and over. So let's go ahead and click on under seven. And this is going to ask if you're looking to do a story, a news article, an opinion piece or a poem. So let's say that I want to do a story. You can take a look at how long a spark will be. So if you want your students to have a 10 minute writing activity, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, so on and so forth, you can click on 10 minutes just for an example and it's going to give you a writing prompt. So let's say that this particular prompt and it will always give you new ones. Your spark is, imagine you get locked in your favorite store overnight and then you can begin your planning. Yeah, it's going to have you try to describe your setting at the beginning. It's going to take you through all different types of things. It's going to give you prompts ideas, ask you through all those types of things. Just a few other things that are here. You can also go eight and up. I'm going to take you back. If you want to write now as a student, again, it asks your students the same questions, stories, news, poetry, opinion. Let's say I want them to write a news piece. So it's actually going to give you write your headline here and it gives you locations to be able to write, write your newspaper article. You can save or clear. It'll ask you who's the article about, what's your report about, when did it happen, where did it take place, why how. So it's asking you who, what when, where, why, how and what quotes will you include. A few other items that are here. If you go to resources, this also gives you all different types of downloading and printing the planning sheets. If you want to be able to do this offline, you've got videos. You also have a lesson hive down here at the bottom of the page and the lesson hive gives you all different types of lessons that you can follow for everywhere from English to personal and social health from grades one from ages 11 and over. You've also got writing, drawing and quiz activities. They also have super spelling, winter challenges and they have all different types of information that they add all the time. So in other words, you've got just a great location for all different types of information for writing, writing ideas, sparks. If you're not interested in using the whole tool and all the writing, you can just gather up some of the writing prompts and use those in class. That's completely up to you. You can gather these up and use these in your favorite class or management system, completely up to you as to what you might be interested in using. However, you'd like to use it, you don't have to use the entire system. But there got a lot of really nice stuff here and I wanted to share it with you. Hope you enjoy. Thanks so much for watching. More videos for you soon.