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.

Video games are suspected of inciting violence in youth, but a subgenre of literature borrowing narrative structures from video games suggests that they can instead boost youth empowerment and activism. These ludic (game- or play-oriented) stories also suggest ways storytelling can evolve to engage youth in a world where technology is not an add-on, but an essential way of being. Through a close analysis of Salman Rushdie’s (2010) children’s novel Luka and the Fire of Life, this study demonstrates the potential of integrating technology and storytelling to develop young people’s problem solving skills and civic engagement.

Visual marketing expert Shlomi Ron discusses how brands can better leverage the power of visual storytelling to drive impact.

Jim Lerman's insight:

Visual storytelling can be an important element in education as well.

Create storyboards with our free storyboard software! Filmmaker, teachers, students, businesses all love Storyboard That, easy online storyboard & comic creator

A Handy Infographic Featuring 28 Web Tools to Help Students Enhance Their Writing Skills

Here are at least 14 trusty online tools of all kinds to give your students the edge as they work on improving writing skills.

[You owe it to yourself to read this. Despite what I thought I knew, I found it harrowing. -JL]

"When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads. (I’m what some call a Facebook “lurker.”)

"But when I opened my file, it was like opening Pandora’s box.

"With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.

"There was so much that Facebook knew about me — more than I wanted to know. But after looking at the totality of what the Silicon Valley company had obtained about yours truly, I decided to try to better understand how and why my data was collected and stored. I also sought to find out how much of my data could be removed.

"How Facebook collects and treats personal information was central this week when Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, answered questions in Congress about data privacy and his responsibilities to users. During his testimony, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly said Facebook has a tool for downloading your data that “allows people to see and take out all the information they’ve put into Facebook.” (Those who want to download their own Facebook data can use this link.)

"But that’s an overstatement. Most basic information, like my birthday, could not be deleted. More important, the pieces of data that I found objectionable, like the record of people I had unfriended, could not be removed from Facebook, either."

Of all the resources we publish on The Learning Network, perhaps it’s our vast collection of writing prompts that is our most widely used resource for teaching and learning with The Times.

We’ve published iterations of this post in the past — 200, 401 and even 650 prompts — but never before have we gathered all our prompts, for both personal and argument writing, into one categorized list.

Admittedly, the list is huge. In fact, there are 1,225 questions below on everything from video games and fashion to smartphones and parenting, and each prompt links to a Times article as well as to additional subquestions that can encourage deeper thinking.

To help you navigate this page, here’s an index of topics:

"Grass Valley Elementary’s schoolwide shift towards connected learning and maker education, supported by an LRNG Innovators Challenge grant, is letting students shine by giving them opportunities for authentic expression while connecting to their passions and communities.

“We often think of Grass Valley as ‘The Little School that Could.’”

"This is how Paula Mitchell, a teacher at Oakland, California’s Grass Valley Elementary School begins the story of her school’s embrace of student choice and connected learning. The shift began in earnest in the 2016-2017 school year, as four of Grass Valley’s classrooms implemented a new project-based learning curriculum. This year, the transformation has gone schoolwide, thanks to a grant from the 2017 LRNG Innovators Challenge.

"The LRNG Innovators Challenge grants stem from a partnership between LRNG, powered by Collective Shift, the National Writing Project, and John Legend’s Show Me Campaign to help educators extend time and space for Connected Learning. The Connected Learning theory posits that learning happens on a continuum—in school, as well as at home, work, and among friends—and is driven by students’ own interests and life experiences.

"Through this project, called Linked Learning with Maker-Centered Education, Grass Valley Elementary is expanding its makerspace and leveraging that maker ethos to transform the whole school with school-wide projects, crowd-sourced afterschool events, and support for individual pursuits and tinkering."

Author and professor Adam Grant said, “Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make their audiences feel smart."

The many benefits of having a penpal as a child
Not only does having a penpal from abroad open children’s eyes into different cultures it also encourages them to write. So much is done on the IPad or equivalent these days, including at school, the need to write letters and postcards is lost. The world we live in now mostly communicates via emails and text messaging and heavily relies on slang and shorthand (such as lol, rofl, thx). Everything is auto corrected (thankfully!) but the art of spelling, punctuating and grammar has gone out of the window.

iFake Text Message is a great tool for creating authentic looking materials to engage students and shift materials design into a genre that’s both relevant and familiar. The tool enables you to create a screen image of a text conversation.

Creating a fake text is easy just go to: https://ifaketextmessage.com/

Type your message into the field on the left and you will see it appear on the screen on the right.

Then just add more text and build your conversation.

You can customise most of the features of the screen to make it look more authentic.

When you have finished just click on the ‘Create Image’ button. You can then download it and add it to your materials.

Our goal with Fable is to give you a whole new way for expressing yourself virtually. Use your own avatar in augmented reality to tell stories, express feelings, share moments and create memories. This is the new generation of emoji and the next step in making virtual communication more personal. Emojis are old, create a Fable!