Students analyze characterization by creating their own superheroes or super-villains, complete with related gadgets and settings.

Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.

Students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this minilesson, students can develop a variety of types of writing.

Students use illustrations from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick as a guide to write mysteries and then present their stories to the class for students to discuss to which illustration each story corresponds.

In this lesson, students analyze similarities and differences among depictions of slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Douglass' Narrative, and nineteenth century photographs of slaves. Students formulate their analysis of the role of art and fiction, as they attempt to reliably reflect social ills, in a final essay.

Students select a book to read based only on its cover art. After reading the book, they use an interactive tool to create a new cover for it.

In this lesson, students read a literary text with the eye of a director, selecting scenes from the text and putting a cinematic spin on them.

Students research the items listed in the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel, noting their historical relevance, and then document their findings using an online chart.

To prepare for literature circles featuring historical novels, students research the decades of the 1930s to the 1990s and share their information using Prezi, a web application for creating multimedia presentations.

Following the traditional form of the haiku, students publish their own haikus using Animoto, an online web tool to produce slideshows that blend text and music.

After researching various natural disasters, students share their findings with each other using glogs, or through poster presentations.

In this alternative book report, students identify the elements of fiction in books they have read by creating glogs, interactive multimedia posters, and then share their glogs.

What drives changes to classic myths and fables? In this lesson students evaluate the changes Disney made to the myth of "Hercules" in order to achieve their audience and purpose.

Students research careers of their own choosing. Then using Piktochart, students create their own infographics to illustrate their research.

After researching various human-made disasters such as the BP oil spill, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Great Chicago Fire, students share their research in oral presentations. Then students pair up to compare and contrast their disasters using the Venn Diagram Student Interactive or the Venn diagram Mobile App.

To share their research on biomes, students use iPads to create postcards from all over the world.

After researching alternative sources of energy, students create online comic books to present their information.

Using the free Trading Cards Mobile App, students create trading cards to share properties of various minerals with their classmates and connect the use of minerals to their own lives.

Students will enjoy learning about physical and chemical changes as they turn their own photos into a narrated video using the iPad app SonicPics to illustrate (and eat) their results from a popcorn lab.