Wacky Web Tales

[Andrew Birt]

Everyone has heard about Mad Libs. Here is a great site for students to practice parts of speech. Check out http://www.eduplace.com/tales/.

[Ramiah Qasem]

What an awesome site!
Thanks Andrew

[Ben Rimes]

I second it! It's an awesome place for doing online Mad Libs; will easily eat up 30 to 45 minutes of time in the computer lab. Just make sure you tell kids not to print until AFTER they've click the finish button and the story is created, otherwise all they get is a list of their words :)

[Leslie Shellie]

This is a great site. It reminds me of a program we used 10+ years ago (we still used 5 1/4 floppies). It was called "Big Red". Just like these tales you provided words and then they were put in the story or Little Red Riding Hood.

The stories are geared for 3rd grade and up but, as a class and in small groups I tried a few of the stories with my kindergarten class. They love it. I think I might incorporate it into workshop activities.

Thanks!!

[Andrea Jackson]

That website does look like fun! I think that some of my second graders could do it, although I guess I'd need to make sure they know what an adjective is first!

[Ben Rimes]

You can have them visit my 4th grader's Mad Lib Wiki. Just click on a Classroom Page, and then click on one of the kids pages, and you'll get a lot of word banks. It's a work in progress, but it would be a great project site to work in companion with the Wacky Web Tales.

[Andrew Birt]

Unfortunately my school blocks all wiki sites for students. They view it as social networking, which is against policy.

[Ben Rimes]

While wikis can sometimes function as social networks, they have a very clear and different purpose than networking; online document collaboration.

The good news is that many of the more popular wiki sites now allow for educators to carefully monitor and control their wikis with moderation and student accounts. Couple that with the fact that the Michigan Educational Technology Standards actually require students to have experience with online collaboration tools by the end of 5th grade (blogs, wikis, and other web 2.0 tools), and you've got a VERY strong argument why such sites should not be included with a blanket ban.

[Andrew Birt]

I have been fighting this for several years. Being that I work at a charter school that encompasses over 50 buildings, it is extremely difficult to get something changed even with good reason. At one time, I was granted 1 week usage for wikis to use with my students. Unfortunately, it took about a month to get that allowance.

[Ben Rimes]

I used to work at a charter school that was completely the opposite; they didn't really care what I did online with the kids so long as I was careful about it. Not the best situation, I prefer some limits.

Sorry to hear that you have such a hard time with your filtering. If it ever gets bad enough, start bringing up those standards and get behind them; they're very good friends :)

[Susan Jazwiec]

I was working on parts of speech and when I saw this site discussed, I added it to my lesson. The stories turned out okay. But the whole project, including the time on "parts of speech" activities, took a lot of time. Here are the plans, and activities if anyone is interested.
http://jazwiec.pbwiki.com/Wacky-Tales