The tag line for One Word is serious: Don’t think. Just write.

A visitor has one word and sixty seconds. No time for writer’s block. No time for nuanced analysis. Lots of time for serendipities emerging from a mind at play.

The bar moving across the screen tracks the seconds — green, yellow, red — until — ding! — a message says “finish your last sentence.”

Add a name and an e-mail address, and you can read what everyone else wrote about when you get to the next page. Follow the arrows to see yesterday’s word and responses, and click to keep going back.

You can write about today’s word as many times as you wish, but there won’t be a new word until tomorrow. It will be a simple word like scarf or deliberate or trail. And it can bring out the writer in young and old.

Special thanks again to Mary!

Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism when she was 11 years old. She had written “The Frost King,” a short story, and it was published and celebrated as an example of what disabled people can do if they are educated. Unfortunately, it was very similar to “The Frost Fairies” by Margaret Canby, which her teacher had read to her a few years earlier. Keller had done it unintentionally, but she had, in fact, plagiarized.

There’s not much we can do about students who plagiarize on purpose. For those who, like Keller, are trying to do the right thing and sometimes just slip up, new help has arrived. Jeffrey Smith, a recent college graduate, offers Plagiarism Detect. He writes on his home page, “I was having BIG problems with plagiarism in my papers.” This site shares his solution, which he describes as a “a great opportunity to check essays, term papers, research papers and other written documents at no cost.”

Smith says his site works by comparing a submitted text to resources indexed by Google. A recent upgrade also checks PDF files, online books, and blogs.

The site’s primary purpose is “to help students prevent plagiarism in their academic papers,” Smith says, adding, “It can be a useful tool for those who want to be original in writing.” Smith does not charge for this service — it is free.

I tested it by submitting a couple of my own blog posts and a blurb from my newsletter. While it returned several false positives, these were easily identifiable. It also identified the correct sources.

I’m thinking of adding it to my classroom procedures and making it almost part of the writing process — “Submit your paper to Plagiarism Detect and deal appropriately with any issues it flags before you hand your paper in to me.”

The site accepts donations but does not charge a fee.

FILM (Finding Inspiration in Literature & Movies) is a movie curricula program for young people promoting literacy, activity-based learning and service.

The program was created in 2004 by Heartland Truly Moving Pictures and the National Collaboration for Youth . Its focus is the development and distribution of free curricula based on Truly Moving Picture award-winning films to channel positive messages and life-affirming themes into the minds and lives of youth.

The curricula are designed in conjunction with movie studios and youth educators to get youth reading and watching quality content, provoke thought and exploration of pertinent themes and issues, and inspire participation in theme-based activities and service projects.

Guides are currently available for 20 movies, including the following:

• Prince Caspian
• Because of Winn-Dixie
• Happy Feet
• Freedom Writers
• Ratatouille

The guides are rich with activities emphasizing literacy skills, character development, and community service/activity.

Special thanks to Terri at Learning is For Everyone!

If you teach a unit on mythology — or even if you don’t — you have GOT to visit Zak Hamby’s Nixa Mythology site and click on Teacher Resources. This is a terrific example of what happens when you get out of the way and let a creative teacher explore the possibilities!

My personal favorite — based on sheer creativity — is the Trojan Find-it. Think “the Iliad meets Where’s Waldo?” Mythological Barbie is a very close second, though.

I suggested to Mr. Hamby that his obvious talent could earn him some extra gas money if he were to offer these resources at a reasonable price. He responded, “My intent is … to make those resources available for free. Since I worked so hard on them, I just want them to be used!”

Give the man his wish — visit the site, bookmark it, add it to your Del.icio.us collection, and spread the word. Summer school is coming for some of us, and August is just 9 weeks away for the rest of us.

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is an “open-source” web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Writing for Wikipedia “seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge,” than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city.

“The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren’t very good,” said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.

To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia’s web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as “Featured Articles,” and run each day on the home page at www.wikipedia.com.

To be ranked as a “Featured Article,” Wikipedia said an entry must “provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.”

Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached “Featured Article” status, it said.

As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem,” accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.”

Read the entire article.

Teachers are always on the lookout for timely examples of concepts we are about to present in class. This example of irony just hit my inbox: a factory in China discovered that the thousands of colorful flags they were producing were actually “Free Tibet” emblems. Police suspect some may appear in demonstrations when the Olympic torch passes through Hong Kong.

The Website Despair.com has good ironic visuals. (Warning — while the site is intended to be humorous, it may be dangerous for teachers in the spring. Don’t stay on the site long. You’ll see what I mean.) My favorites include “Ambition,” “Do It Later,” and “Loneliness.”

Whitelies.tv offers irony appropriate for classroom use on a couple of levels. Produced by an anti-smoking group, the commercial shows a widow explaining that her husband had always planned to start a healthier lifestyle a little later in his life. The day before his 50th birthday, they learned that his lung cancer had spread to his brain. It ends with this chilling statement: “Gary said he wouldn’t smoke after he turned 50. He was right.”

We have to make sure students understand the concept before we turn them loose with the fifth act of Romeo and Juliet or Jonathan Swift’s classic, “A Modest Proposal.” How do YOU introduce irony?

Think Aloud is a reading strategy designed to model the way good readers “think through” a text to understand it. It’s often used for remediation in middle and high school classrooms.

Greece Central School District in North Greece, New York, has established a rich repository of instructional strategies and resources, and Think Aloud is one of them.

From the site:

Many of us developed our skills as readers implicitly, by simply doing a lot of reading of all sorts of texts; after all, reading is a passion for us. Therefore, when we teach reading at the secondary level, we need to keep in mind that we must take what we know and do implicitly and make it explicit for our students, especially for our struggling readers.

This strategy underscores the importance of modeling reading for our students. When I begin “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I use this approach because I know Poe’s style intimidates readers — sometimes even strong readers. It help to pause and think now and then, to reflect and predict. By the time the house collapses, students are comfortable using this approach on their own.