Write About This Free and Write About This ($2.99) are two new writing apps for iPads. I am really excited about this app. I first learned about it on the blog 21innovate.com. The blog author, Brad Wilson, is the creator of this app, and he details his journey in this post. As soon as I read his post, I had to download the app and check it out for myself.
When you open the app, you are given a menu of choices. You can get a random writing prompt, select a category, or create your own. Each prompt is accompanied by a photo. If you get the full app, you will have 125 photos with prompts. The free app has one in each category to get you started.
Once you choose a prompt, you can also listen to it being read (unless it’s a custom prompt), which makes this a great UDL app. Another feature that makes it accessible to many learners is that you can set the level of the prompts to one of three difficulty levels.
After selecting a prompt, students can choose the “Write” icon. They are prompted to give their composition a title and an author. A notebook page then appears next to the photo and prompt, allowing the student to continue to look at the picture while composing the literary masterpiece.
When the writing is complete, the author can save and publish it to the iPad. It can also be shared as an e-mail.
In the next couple of weeks, I will be trying this out with my different grade levels of gifted students, and hope to show you some examples of their writing soon. In the meantime, Brad is bestowing an iTunes code for the full version of Write About This to one lucky reader of this blog. If you enter a comment below with an idea for a writing prompt by midnight, March 1st, 2013, you will be entered in a drawing for the app code.
A writing topic could be:
Write about a food that you do not like to eat.
I like the app “Write About This.” I like the read aloud feature and the leveling of the prompts. One idea I have for using it, especially if you only have the free version, is to have students work as partners, they would select a category, prompt level, and use as story starter. They could then exchange with another group to continue the writing process. Group members could then collaborate once the students have completed the writing. This would work great in the one iPad classroom.