The Internet offers students opportunities to have their writings and other works published. Seeing their work published will result in increasing children’s motivation to write. Many sites which were formerly options have had to close because of an inability to handle the number of submissions, and several of those still operating have disclaimers about their backlog. Please help those who are offering this service by only submitting work that has been prescreened for quality.

Featured opportunity for K-8 students:
Write a poem about a component of the nervous system following age-level guidelines (k-2, 3-5, 6-8). Only one entry per person. Contest deadline is February 1, 2008.

Animal Diaries ..........
http://www.tesan.vuurwerk.nl/diaries/index.html
Grades k-6. Students can have their animal stories, poems, and drawings published. Teacher registration form. Ongoing registration for school year. Progressive stories. Author chats with transcripts of past chat visits and links to authors' homepages. Links to "sister" sites facilitating student research on an endangered animal or species.

KidPub Children's Publishing ..........
http://www.kidpub.org/kidpub/
Grades 3-10. Anyone can read, but publishing requires a paid membership in the KidPub Authors Club at $6.95 for unlimited postings. Payment, either online through PayPal or with a check by regular mail, serves as parental permission. A teacher can purchase a class page for $25 which also gives each student in the class a free one-year membership in the KidPub Authors Club. Published item has date posted and number of times read. Searchable by author’s name, story title, and/or author’s location. Submitted stories are not edited. KidPub has been revived after having a problem with participants posting messages rather than stories; now the "Notes" section is for these messages. "Gary & Liz" is a new story starter each month that participants add on to in a never ending story. KidMud is a section for students to socialize real-time in a role-playing environment. Bee Tip: Most of the writing by younger students is on the schools pages.

Kids On The Net ..........
http://www.kidsonthenet.org.uk/
Grades 2-8. Opportunities to submit writing in a variety of themed projects. Each section gives examples to read, a submission form, how-to advice, related activities and links. All submissions are checked and approved before posting. Because of the number of submissions generated by the popularity of the site, some pages of the website are not currently open to new writing (including Kids' Castle). Links to these pages appear at the bottom of the homepage and in other menus since all of the website is still open for reading.

KidsBookshelf ..........
http://www.kidsbookshelf.com/
Grades 3-8. Use the leftbar menu under "Publish Your Work" to submit a poem, story, or book review. Artwork submissions are "temporarily closed". The student must use the online submission form and must have a teacher's or parent's permission. Read what others have submitted. Bee Tip: When you click to read submissions, notice that the newest are at the bottom of the list. Open to any k-12 student, but will be of most interest to grades 3-8.

KidsCom Create ..........
http://www.kidscom.com/create/write/write.html
Grades 3-9. Submit a story using a character, prop, and place given on the site. These change each Wednesday. A student author includes only first name, age, and country. Viewers can also vote on top story of the week from five finalists selected at random by KidsCom staff. Stories are entered as age 11 and under, or age 12 and over. One potential problem with this as a publishing site is the number of opportunities to click on buttons that leave the writing section of this site.

Make Beliefs Comix ..........
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/
Grades 3-6. Students can create their own mini graphic novels to print or email. The site has ten human and animal characters with different emotions. Empty talk or thought balloons await written dialogue. The site is created and offered for free use by Bill Zimmerman. Requires Flash.

MatMice ..........
http://www.matmice.com/
Grades 5-8. Kids can make and edit their own page on the web at no cost. Individuals register and receive homepage space on the MatMice servers. A potential user needs to understand the content guidelines and agreement before registering. Ad line at bottom of each homepage is unobtrusive. You won’t find academic reports here, but you also won’t find anything vulgar. There are some good examples but the appeal is definitely the chance to express oneself rather than the finished product. Bee Tip: Click through the "next homepage" link as a basis for talking about website evaluation. Content is generally quite preteenish, some designs are unreadable, and several are only a title and picture. The concept was created by three teenage sisters from Australia; the oldest is now in her 20s.

The Neverending Tale ..........
http://www.coder.com/creations/tale/
Grades 4-10. Select one of the choose-your-own-path stories and create a new page to add from almost any point in the story. Lack of funding has limited the plans of the developers, but pages are still currently being added. Bee tip: Use as a model for story writing in your classroom using a word processor with a “link within document” feature.

StickerBook ..........
http://www.iknowthat.com/com/L3?Area=StickerBook
Grades k-6. An activity in the Iknowthat collection. Select a Dinosaur or Ancient Egypt theme. Create pages by selecting picture-stickers to drag-and-drop on the background. Can add text. Pages can be printed and/or submitted when the free registration is completed. The intro screens have several boxes of ads and menus to other parts of the site, so students will need initial guidance to navigate. The possibilities for making changes on pages will challenge even sixth graders, while pre-readers can simply drag-and-drop and change sizes of stickers. Bonus feature - the factoids that appear in the corner outside the picture; audio on or off.

Story Book ..........
http://www.kids-space.org/story/story.html
Grades k-10. Students from around the world submit their stories online in English for publication on one of four "bookshelves". 1- create a rebus story using icons of a monthly theme; 2- submit original stories, poems, or other writing, can be illustrated; 3- retell folktales from your country; or 4- class work. Teachers are asked to complete a "Class Story Entry Form" in advance when a class will be participating. Kids' Space retains copyright to submitted material. Archives from 1995. Children of any age up to 16 can submit, but most authors are in elementary grades. Teachers can explore the Kids' Space home page for related opportunities to write.

StoryTeller ..........
http://www.edbydesign.com/storyteller/index.html
Grades 1 and up. Individual students sign up to become a member with points needed to submit stories, jokes and poems online for one of the topics given. Submissions are reviewed for content before posted for viewing, and rated 1-5. Points are earned for better stories, and it costs one point to submit each story. Editing allows minor original errors in spelling, grammar, or style. Over 40,000 items have been submitted from around the world by students ages 5-18, although most are from grades 3-7. The homepage is intimidating, but you can search this database with an excellent site search engine. Submissions become the property of edbydesign, an Australian company. Bee Tip: Scroll down the topics and you’ll find a whole section related to Harry Potter.

Writers' Window ..........
http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/writers/home.html
Grades 1 and up. Site content is current and monitored. Students age 6 and up can submit their work online to be reviewed for publication. Sections for stories, poems, reports, reviews, plays, and collaborative story starters. Published writing is grouped by authors age: 5-8, 9-12, 13-15, 16+. Users can register to receive feedback on submitted works and can participate in online discussions. Funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

Some teachers are beginning to promote student use of a blog as a communication tool, seeing an advantage in a blog as being more controlled than instant messaging, more flexible than a listserv and easier to create than a website. A teacher can start a class blog with a free account from various hosting services. Using a ’team’ setting means that the author has control over who can participate.

Ms. Kreul's Class Blog ..........http://marykreul.teacherhosting.com/blog/
An example of a fourth grade class blog.

Blogger ..........http://www.blogger.com
One site for setting up a blog account; owned by Google. The step-by-step tour shows how easy it is to create a blog.

Schoolblogs Network ..........http://www.schoolblogs.net/wpress/
Not currently active, this archive example shows the potential of blogs in the elementary classroom with rationale and examples.

KidzBlog ..........http://www.haranbanjo.com/kidzblog/
Grades 2 and up teachers. Downloadable authoring tool designed to enable students to publish a weblog with text and pictures. The potential user is encouraged to examine the online User's Guide and download the program for trial before the one-time purchase of $9.00 if a teacher, $19.00 for general user, or $99.00 for twenty stations.

ePALS SchoolBlog ..........http://schoolblog.epals.com/?id=CommunityHandHListing
With SchoolBlog, a teacher creates a blog account for the classroom that can stand alone or integrate with the school’s website. The teacher can control the audience that can see a posting to students only, parents only, or for public viewing, but each student or parent who will post or view restricted content needs a purchased account. Startup cost is $64 plus additional accounts as needed. Supports podcasting, video podcasting, RSS feeds. This site has a Tour and sample blog that demonstrate how SchoolBlog works.

Book Blog Rubric for Students ..........http://teachfine.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/BlogRubric
Grades 4 and up. Contributing to the blog can be another format for a class assignment. In this example, a blog is maintained for student responses to a teacher question about a book and this rubric is used for assessment.

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