Night Zookeeper's International Writing Cup

Night Zookeeper is an excellent new site for students to help them w/ their Writing skills through fun interactive lessons/competition.  Also, it has an educational portal that allows educators to: assign lessons, track student progress, and assess their work in real-time.  This makes it easy for teachers to differentiate instruction and implement project based learning in their classroom.

Starting tomorrow on November 1st, Night Zookeeper is launching their latest International Writing Cup for 2018.  This Writing challenge/contest will have students writing in three different phases.

The Writing Triathlon

1. Stage 1: Instructions - The students will write a set of instructions how to write an excellent adventure story.
2. Stage 2: Report - The students will create a lead character for the adventure and write more words describing them w/ an abundance of adjectives.
3. Stage 3: Adventure Story - The students will then use their instructions and report to help them writing an amazing adventure story.

The competition will end Nov 30th and their will be one winner for each age/grade level 6-8, and over 9.  Finally, the prizes will range from team trophies, individual trophies, and badges and certificates.

For more information on Night Zookeeper's International Writing Cup 2018 click here!!!

Night Zookeeper June Challenge

Night Zookeeper is an excellent new site for students to help them w/ their Writing skills through fun interactive lessons/competition.  Also, it has an educational portal that allows educators to: assign lessons, track student progress, and assess their work in real-time.  This makes it easy for teachers to differentiate instruction and implement project based learning in their classroom.

Recently Night Zookeeper announced they are running a new writing competition for students to create a NEW location on the Night Zoo map.

The challenge
"Hello, young zookeepers! We have a new competition for you to enter. All you have to do is invent and describe a new location for the Night Zoo. You can also illustrate your location as well. The winning entry will be illustrated and added to the map that you can see above. Good luck to everyone taking part!"

How to enter
There are two ways to enter the competition:

1. Visit the star writing page to enter the competition with your students
2. If you would prefer, you can also print this activity sheet and ask your students to complete it. Then email all entries to paul@nightzookeeper.com or Tweet us on @nightzookeeper

The prizes
We are giving away a couple of prizes to the winning entry:
1. The location will be illustrated by our team and placed in the map above. 
2. The child will receive a poster of their location delivered to their school or house. 

Click here for more info about Star Writing!!!

For more information on Night Zookeeper's latest online challenge click here.

Night Zookeeper Star Writing May Challenge

Night Zookeeper is an excellent new site for students to help them w/ their Writing skills through fun interactive lessons/competition.  Also, it has an educational portal that allows educators to: assign lessons, track student progress, and assess their work in real-time.  This makes it easy for teachers to differentiate instruction and implement project based learning in their classroom.

Recently Night Zookeeper announced they are running two different Star Writing Challenges in April, where students will have the chance(s) to get their writing published in the third Night Zookeeper book, The Penguins of Igloo City!

The first challenge is: "Write a speech for your animal to deliver on the campaign trail."

As the maximum word allowance is 500 words, students of all ages can take part. These fun, short challenges with great prizes are a great way to excite students and motivate them to write!

More info...

• The second challenge starts on the 20th May to June 3rd.
• Students just have to visit the Star Writing page and click 'accept this mission' to start writing.
• All teachers have to do is publish and nominate their students' writing to their Night Zookeeper class blog by 4pm GMT 3rd June 2018.
• Maximum 500 words
• You can learn how to publish and nominate student writing by watching this 20 second tutorial video.

Click here for more info about Star Writing!!!

I highly recommend checking out Night Zookeeper by clicking here!!!

Night Zookeeper Star Writing Challenge 2

Night Zoopkeeper is an excellent new site for students to help them w/ their Writing skills through fun interactive lessons/competition.  Also, it has an educational portal that allows educators to: assign lessons, track student progress, and assess their work in real-time.  This makes it easy for teachers to differentiate instruction and implement project based learning in their classroom.

Recently Night Zookeeper announced they are running two different Star Writing Challenges in April, where students will have the chance(s) to get their writing published in the third Night Zookeeper book, The Penguins of Igloo City!

The first challenge is: "Write a story set in Igloo City"

As the maximum word allowance is 500 words, students of all ages can take part. These fun, short challenges with great prizes are a great way to excite students and motivate them to write!

More info...

• The second challenge starts on the 15th April to April 29th.
• Students just have to visit the Star Writing page and click 'accept this mission' to start writing.
• All teachers have to do is publish and nominate their students' writing to their Night Zookeeper class blog by 4pm GMT 29th April.
• Maximum 500 words
• You can learn how to publish and nominate student writing by watching this 20 second tutorial video.
• The winners will be revealed in an exciting live storytelling event on Facebook at the end of April!

Click here for more info about Star Writing!!!

I highly recommend checking out Night Zookeeper by clicking here!!!

Storynory

Storynory is a nice little site similar to Book Wink, where a student clicks on a story and then listens to it. What makes Storynory so great is the ability to download these audio tracks to your computer.



There is a lot here to like so I recommend checking Storynory out by clicking here.

Level It Books

Level It Books is an excellent iOS app that teachers everywhere are using to scan a book and get a Reading Level.  This is perfect for anyone who wants to be able to easily find out if a book is the appropriate Reading Level for their student/child.  Best of all a educator can use this to track their students and their Reading Levels, keep a digital library of class books, and even create wish lists (think Amazon).  Also, there are lots of other features such as manually searching for books, a book of the day, and more.

I highly recommend checking out Level It Books by clicking here!!!

*Level It Books is an advertiser of Technology Tidbits.

Level It Books

Level It Books is a fantastic iOS app for teachers and parents.  This app allows users to scan a book's ISBN and get detailed information such as a Reading& Lexile Level.  Also, a teacher can maintain a class roster of students w/ their Reading Level information as well as maintain a library of books.  Another nice feature is the ability to manually search for a book and even maintain a library of
classroom books.

I highly recommend checking out Level It Books by clicking here!!!

*Level It Books is an advertiser of Technology Tidbits.

Zocial Books

Zocial Books is a nice search engine for finding books.  The results give nice thumbnails and description of the book w/ detailed bibliography details.

I recommend checking out Zocial Books by clicking here.

60 Second Recap

60 Second Recap is another site that I've reviewed before that I came across again.  This is a wonderful site for getting a written review and 60 second video review of a book.  A person can view reviews by section of a specific title and even download a PDF on the book.  This reminds me of reading book reviews on Amazon w/ a lot more details.

I highly recommend checking out 60 Second Recap by clicking here!!

Slime Kids

Slime Kids is a fun new site that I just found out about from Free Technology 4 Teachers. SK has tons to offer elementary students such as book reviews, games, trailers etc. The games cover topics such as grammar, spelling, and typing. While the book trailers show a video about the book and might be the coolest thing on the website.

I highly recommend checking out Slime Kids by clicking here!!!

Library Thing

Library Thing is a nice site for cataloging books and then sharing your thoughts and feeling w/ others. Think of it a social network for books a la Shelfari. A user can rate books on a star system (ie, Amazon), connect w/ other users, etc etc.

I recommend checking out Library Thing by clicking here!!

For similar sites check out Book Army or Goodreads.

ShelfLuv

ShelfLuv is a site that reminds me a lot of the Mac app, Delicious Library. This is a social network for book lovers for sharing, rating, commenting on books. Also, a user can create their own virtual book shelf which has a very nice visual appeal.

I highly recommend checking out ShelfLuv by clicking here!!

Feed

I decided to do something a little different w/ this post and that is do a review of book that contains technology. I will do this from time to time w/ movies and books that I feel have a good amount of technology in them. Why? Well, I thought it would be a fun thing to do and I'd love to hear feedback from readers who share some of the same tastes as I do.

Feed is a book by Mira Grant and is the first book in the Newsflesh Trilogy. I like to compare this to a cross between Dawn of the Dead meets Primary Colors. Being a huge horror fanatic, I was super excited to be reading a book about zombies. However, that is just a small part about what this book is about. It is more about the political race of claiming a new president and the conspiracy of incomprehensible proportions.

What I really like about this book is how it treats "amplification" or the process of turning into a zombie. It treats it as a virus and how it spreads and so on and so forth. Now, this book does take place in the future so there is a lot of technology to be found. Most importantly how technology covers the news and that blogging is now the main source of finding out the most current and truthful news.

Anyone who is interested in blogging or has a blog of their own, should really give this book a chance as they will be fascinated at how blogging has evolved from the present day. It is very detailed and highly entertaining.

On a scale of 5 stars I would give it 4 1/2.

Other books filled w/ technology that I highly recommend and might review in the future are: Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, and the Stieg Larsson trilogy, Girl w/ Dragon Tattoo, Girl who Played w/ Fire and the Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest.

Click here for more info on Feed.

Literature Map

Literature Map is a fun site that I just found out about from the excellent blog, iLearn Technology. This is a great site to find out similar authors by typing in an authors name and watching as the cloud forms.

Below is an example of a Literature Map of Stieg Larsson...



Once the map is created, a user can click on another author to form another map from that author.

Give Literature Map a try by clicking here.

For other fun sites w/ books check out Book Lamp or Book Seer.

Book Flavor

Book Flavor is a great site I just learned about from the award winning, Free Technology 4 Teachers. It is a search engine for books that is similar to how Amazon works.



I highly recommend checking out Book Flavor to meet all your reading needs by clicking here!!

Booktagger

Booktagger is a site I just found out about on Twitter from Ozge Karagolu. I like to think of this as an alternative to Shelfari which is ideal for finding books and building an online bookshelf. Once that is a done a person can share their shelf w/ others and even recommend or review their books.

Give Booktagger a try by clicking here!!

Read Print

Read Print is an interesting site that is ideal for library and reading teachers/students. This is a site that contains 1000's of free online, book, poems, and resources for anyone to use.

Give Read Print a try by clicking here!!

Book Lamp

Book Lamp is a wonderful new (beta) site that is very similar to Book Seer or Your Next Read. This is a site where a user must register first before they can use the service. Once logged in a person can browse for a author or book and then watch as their results come up in real time. Book Lamp then recommends which books should next be on your must read list.

I highly recommend checking out Book Lamp by clicking here!!



Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the tip!!

Your Next Read

Your Next Read is a fun site similar to Book Seer that recommends books. The way this works is a user types in an author or title of a book then waits to see what books it recommends. While the results can be a bit "off" it is entertaining none the less.

Below is a pic from the Michael Crichton title, Pirate Latitudes...



Give Your Next Read a try by clicking here.

Thanks to Free Technology 4 Teachers for the tip!!

Storynory

Storynory is a site I just found out about from the award winning iLearn Technology. This is a site that is very similar to Book Wink, where a student clicks on a story and then listens to it. What makes Storynory so great is the ability to download these audio tracks to your computer.



There is a lot here to like so I recommend checking Storynory out by clicking here.