ICT for Story Writing

ICT can help students in many ways with story writing and communicating ideas. Forget asking students to simply type out their stories (BORING!!!!) One interesting way for students (who may not feel confident in literacy) to write a story is to make a Rebus Story.

Rebus story writing involves writing a story and inserting pictures of things which symbolise the words - for example, for the word 'see' - they put in a picture of some eyes. Or instead of writing the word 'horse' they put in a picture of a horse. Students learn to find pictures using clip art or google images and upload the file in the correct position.

To see an example of a Rebus Story click here.

When students are learning to write it is important for them to feel confident and through writing Rebus Stories, this is a way to give them success early on for story writing.

Ziptales is a huge site and is great for writing, games and making things. There are clips describing how to make things, for example Tiny Teddies, Make and Do machine. It is possible to get a free trial for 14 days however schools would need to pay to subscribe to this site if they wanted to use it.





Other ideas for writing using IT could be to use only a story heading and then get a student to write for 10 minutes, then get them to swap with a friend and read what they have written and then continue the story on, then swap again. The student would then return to their original chair and read the completed story. This is great for creative writing and helps students venture away from 'safe writing'.

In order to improve spelling and punctuation, teachers could read a passage of writing to students who must type what they have heard with the monitor turned off. This is excellent as it reveals to students how much they may rely on the computer spell checker.