Via The Scout Report

"Of all the network tools we featured in the past year, Library Extension stood out as the clear reader favorite. We're also fans of this simple chrome extension that makes it easy to find and request books at your local public library. Best of all, Library Extension is continuing to grow, allowing readers to find books at libraries across the United States, Canada, and Australia. Library Extension also makes it easy for users to request new or additional libraries.

"Library Extension detects when you're viewing a book or ebook on a site like Amazon or Goodreads and adds a box showing the availability of that item in your local library. If you have access to more than one local library, it is able to check all of them. When an item is available from your library, Library Extension will also include a link allowing you to reserve it. Library Extension currently integrates with over 4,000 local libraries. Users can request support for additional libraries with a simple contact form. Users do not need to register for any additional accounts to use Library Extension. Currently, Library Extension is available for Google Chrome. A version for Mozilla Firefox is under development."

The main characters in a story drive plot, attract readers’ empathy (or loathing) and carry your story along. Understanding how to write a lovable, loathsome, or otherwise engaging main character is a vital skill to develop. Read on for definitions, examples and tips to make your primary characters memorable:

"When people talk about the future of learning, they often mention technology and engineering. Things like Sphero balls and Arduino sets and coding projects. While I love the emphasis on STEM and STEAM, I can’t help but wonder if maybe we miss out on the power of journalism because it isn’t shiny and new.

"However, if you ask people what type of technology skills students will need in the future, you’ll hear things like digital citizenship, media literacy, and creative thinking. Unfortunately, schools tend to teach these topics in isolation, as if they exist in separate little buckets.

"But journalism takes the buckets and mixes them all together. Here, these ideas overlap constantly."

The OPTIC Strategy is a 5-step method used to analyze visuals. The strategy can be used to analyze any visual work.

Using the OPTIC Strategy can help you to prepare for the AP exam, but it can also provide you with a framework of analysis to be used in a wide variety of situations: tell your boss if the new billboard will get the right message across, analyze a website for a little extra money on the side, or impress a date with an intellectual analysis of a painting at the museum.

Now that you know when to use it, it’s time to get to how. The five steps are (1) overview, (2) parts, (3) title, (4) interrelationships, and (5) conclusion. Now for a more useful study guide, check out the infographic below.

Writing can be an incredible tool for learning and understanding complex ideas. Writing can help you organize your thoughts, ascribe meaning to new concepts and see your own misconceptions about a topic. When you write, you connect ideas in ways you wouldn’t by just thinking about them.

This set of OWL resources aims to help engineering instructors and TAs create and assess a variety of short, low-overhead writing exercises for use in engineering courses. The primary focus here is on “writing to learn” assignments, which leverage writing to improve students’ conceptual understanding of technical concepts.

From The Scout Report

"The Purdue OWL recently created this helpful resource for incorporating writing instruction into engineering classrooms, which may be useful for engineering instructors and teaching assistants. Created with support from the National Science Foundation's Research Initiation Grant in Engineering Education (RIGEE), these resources are designed with two purposes. The first is to support students in developing their writing skills; the second, to help students understand engineering concepts through writing exercises. With these dual aims in mind, this collection highlights six kinds of writing prompts that instructors might use with engineering students. These consist of conceptual writing prompts aimed at asking students to explain engineering concepts, such as fluid mechanics, in writing. Others include explain-a-problem writing prompts, which are designed to accompany engineering computational problems; how stuff works writing prompts (one example: "Explain how the gears of a bicycle work? What is changing when you change gears?"); real-world example writing prompts; design-a-problem writing prompts; and open-ended design writing prompts (one example: "Design a viewing platform that hangs over the Grand Canyon.")"

Over the last couple of months I've found and written about a number of really great tools and resources to help improve our students' writing skills. This is a collection of links to reviews of ten of the best.

Scroll down on the page to locate this post. -JL

"Did you know that researchers have found that children's persuasive writing abilities develop more slowly than any other genre (Applebee, Langer, & Mullins, 1986)?  That means that it is essential that we get students writing persuasively as often as possible. One of the best ways to motivate students to write persuasively is with really fun and engaging writing topics.  In addition, when we give students different types of ways to write persuasively from speeches to critical reviews, we can really engage students.  

"In the spirit of getting students writing, I've compiled 15 of my favorite topics and styles of persuasive writing. These ideas are sure to get your students excited about writing persuasively!"

via Elaine J. Roberts

Via The Scout Report

"The Haiku Foundation (THF) is a non-profit organization that aims to "preserve and archive the accomplishments of our first century of haiku in English, and to provide resources for its expansion in our next." On the foundation's Educational Resources page, K-12 and college educators will find resources for integrating haiku into the classroom. These resources are organized by grade level and are designed to complement existing language arts curriculum. Resources include lesson plans, classroom handouts, and "teaching stories" (reflections from educators who incorporated haiku into their classrooms). Most lesson plans on this website were designed by THF president Jim Kacian and by poet Ellen Grace Olinger, Ed.D. Additional lesson plans were contributed by poets Brad Bennett and Tom Painting."

Many celebrated writers have championed the creative benefits of keeping a diary, but no one has put the diary to more impressive practical use in the creative process than John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968). In the spring of 1938, shortly after performing one of the greatest acts of artistic courage — that of changing one’s mind when a creative project is well underway, as Steinbeck did when he abandoned a book he felt wasn’t living up to his humanistic duty — he embarked on the most intense writing experience of his life. The public fruit of this labor would become the 1939 masterwork The Grapes of Wrath — a title his politically radical wife, Carol Steinbeck, came up with after reading The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Howe. The novel earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was a cornerstone for his Nobel Prize two decades later, but its private fruit is in many ways at least as important and morally instructive.

Alongside the novel, Steinbeck also began keeping a diary, eventually published as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (public library) — a remarkable living record of his creative journey, in which this extraordinary writer tussles with excruciating self-doubt (exactly the kind Virginia Woolf so memorably described) but plows forward anyway, with equal parts gusto and grist, driven by the dogged determination to do his best with the gift he has despite his limitations. His daily journaling becomes a practice both redemptive and transcendent.

Steinbeck had only two requests for the diary — that it wouldn’t be made public in his lifetime, and that it should be made available to his two sons so they could “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.” It stands, above all, as a supreme testament to the fact that the sole substance of genius is the daily act of showing up.