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From the website:
"These guidelines for engineering writing and scientific writing are designed to help students communicate their technical work. To that end, these guidelines contain advice, models, and exercises for common writing and speaking assignments in engineering and science."
Be sure to use the arrows at the bottom right of the page to access more helpful resources. -JL 
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By Stephen Wilmarth on Silvia Tolisano's blog, Langwitches.
Wilmarth describes (and provides ample video samples of) a very rich project in which students at his middle school in Wuhan China exchange videos with an all-girls Catholic high school in Liverpool, Australia.
The basic idea of the project is that students at one school create a video with images and audio and prepare to send it to their partner school. Before doing so, however, the audio track is stripped out. Then the students at the receiving school create their own audio track. Then students are asked to analyze both versions of the films for cultural, language, and creative differences and similarities.
As Wilmarth describes the project further, "I’m interested in finding “evidence” of learning. How does making a movie, including storyboarding, scripting, filming, directing, and producing help to improve language and communication skills? Is there evidence here that language teaching objectives are being met?"
This is a great project and the videos Wilmarth provides are wonderful resources to be considered from numerous perspectives. While the project was designed originally as an ESL project, certainly native speakers can benefit significantly from the analytical and communcation skills the exchanges incorporate. -JL
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By Maria Popova
"The poet John Keats once described the ideal state of the psyche as negative capability — the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” “The truth of life is its mystery,” echoed Joyce Carol Oates. This comfort with mystery and the unknown, indeed, is at the heart not only of poetic existence but also of the most rational of human intellectual endeavors, as many of history’s greatest scientific minds have attested. And yet, caught between the opinion culture we live in and our deathly fear of being wrong, we long desperately for absolutism, certitude, and perfect truth.
"Originally published in 1993, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning (public library) explores what’s arguably the most important dimension of what it means to be human — our inherent imperfection — and the many ways in which we violate it daily, delivering a constellation of wisdom and practical insight on how to live in a way that enables, rather than disempowers, our humanity."
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By Joe Marine
"Speaking of making storytelling a priority over camera tests, Ken Burns is in a league of his own when it comes to filmmaking. His documentaries are widely known and his visual techniques have been adopted by countless productions, so much so that panning and zooming into a still image has been dubbed the “Ken Burns Effect.” For once, however, the lens is turned the other way, and filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason have produced a short documentary called Ken Burns: On Story. In the film embedded below, Burns talks about good storytelling and the ways in which we manipulate audiences."
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From
www
By Maria H. Anderson
"Mass education is adequate, as long as students are highly motivated to learn and get ahead of their peers. In developing countries, a student who is successful in education will be able to climb the ladder of personal economic prosperity faster than those who are not successful. But in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again.
"The vision of a modern education built around personalized learning is not new, but it is definitely tantalizing. Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age (Spectra, 1995) shares a vision of personalized learning in the future via an interactive book that possesses a conversational interface (CI) and “pseudo-intelligence,” a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that is inferior to human intelligence. It’s likely that we’ll see decent conversational interfaces within the next decade, and certainly applications like Google Voice are moving us much closer to this reality. AI that is capable of directing the learning needs of a human will take much longer, developing in the next 20–50 years, but we can’t wait that long for the technology to catch up with education. The need for personalized learning exists in the here and now. So how does one bridge this vision of the future with the realities of the present?
"...A system for personalized learning will not grow from inside formal education. Education is like a field that’s been overplanted with only small patches of fertile soil. Too many stakeholders (parents, unions, administration, faculty, etc.) compete to promote various ideas about how to change, acting like weeds or plagues that choke off plant growth. The fresh and fertile soil of the open Web can foster the quick growth of a personalized learning system. Then, like a good fertilizer, it can be used to replenish the soil of formal education and help us to reach that “Holy Grail” of education: personalized learning for all."
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By Jody Hedlund
"I love judging contests. I always appreciate the way reading entries forces me to evaluate the basics of good fiction writing. I come away from the experience working all the harder to apply the basics to my own stories. I recently did a post about 7 dialog basics after noticing that some of the entrants were struggling to craft dialog. Since I seemed to be making a lot of comments in the entries regarding setting, I thought perhaps I’d do a refresher post on some setting basics as well."
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Joyce Valenza is one of my favorite librarians. Her high school library's website (mentioned here before) is just terrific (Springfield Township, PA)...and she presents and blogs all over.
This particular post is a sweet missive addressed to the graduating seniors in her school detailing how they can maximize their resarch searches when they go off to their respective colleges in the fall.
Lots of good advice here for all of us. -JL
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"Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and a basic requirement for participation in civic life and in the global economy. Yet every year in the United States, large numbers of adolescents graduate from high school unable to write at the basic levels required by colleges and employers. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools, commissioned by Carnegie Corporation of New York and published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, discusses eleven specific teaching techniques that research suggests will help improve the writing abilities of the country’s 4th- to 12th-grade students."
Scroll down on page below the large textbox to find link to this pdf. -JL
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This new 3D game experience allows players to create extensive, story-driven MMO experiences by simply putting bricks together on one screen. Still in the development stages it is worthwhile watching.
This is an alpha release. I signed up for an invitation today (5/20/12). Will comment further when invite arrives. This appears as though it will be quite a useful tool. -JL Via Pippa Davies @PippaDavies
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From the website
"Creating presentations and slideshows is one of the needed skills for both teachers and students. Unfortunately many teachers still find it hard to arrange data into a catchy slideshow to share with students.
"Below is a list of some of the best free tools teachers and students can use to create awesome slideshow and presentations. I have already reviewed all of these tools and therefore attest to their usability."
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By John Paul Titlow
"Unlike a desktop computer, the device is designed to allow the user to focus on only one thing at a time. When one needs to focus on stringing together words without the distractions that so easily flood a desktop computer, the one-task-at-a-time nature of the iPad is a blessing.
"When you unbox an iPad, it's not necessarily ready for an optimal experience of sustained writing. It's pretty close, though. The native Notes app is fine enough, and the touchscreen keyboard gets the job done, but to really make the most of the device's potential, third-party accessories and writing-specific apps are required."
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This could be a nice way for your students to keep a brief diary...only 280 characters a day. -JL
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From the website:
"Today I am introducing you to a set of awesome tools that allow users to easily select any part of a text and hear it in the voice and accent they want. These tools can be very helpful for language teachers. Students can use them to impprove their pronunciation and develop their reading skills. All these tools are easy to use and above all free of charge. Most of these tools are extensions that you can install on your browser."
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By Maria Popova
"It’s that time of year again, the time when cultural icons and luminaries of various stripes flock to podiums around the world to impart their wisdom on a fresh crop of graduating seniors hungry to take on the world. After last year’s omnibus of timeless commencement addresses by J. K. Rowling (“Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself. But poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.”), Steve Jobs (“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”), Robert Krulwich (“You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places.”), Meryl Streep (“This is your time, and it feels normal to you. But, really, there is no ‘normal.’ There’s only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.”), and Jeff Bezos (“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.”), here are five-ish more packets of timeless wisdom."
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By Constance Valis Hill
"Tap dance, our first American vernacular dance form, is an intricate musical and dance exchange that evolved Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of such contemporary low-heeled tap luminaries as Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, Jason Samuels Smith, and such hard-hitting high-heeled women as Chloe Arnold, Michela Marino Lerman, Michelle Dorrance, and Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards."
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Carolyn Foote live blogs Gary Price's preso at Computers in Libraries conf in DC in March 2012. Wonderful list of sites of interest, most of which I had not heard of. -JL
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From the website
"Use the creative writing prompts and creative writing ideas to create stories, poems and other creative pieces from your imagination. The writing prompts can even help you come up with creative content for blogs and blog stories."
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By Michael Gorman
"I am amazed every time I talk to groups and find out so many educators have not used word clouds with their students. In fact I am so sure that you will enjoy this topic I have come up with 108 ways to use word clouds in the classroom. I have tried to include almost every subject. These are a collection of ideas shared with me, various readings, and a lot of my own brainstorming. I know this will be an article you wish to share with others. In order to better understand some of the advanced uses I suggest you may wish to read Part One of this series entitled, 12 Valuable Wordle Tips You Must Read. I am certain you will find at least one new idea… and again please give a retweet. By the way… have an idea I have not listed? Then just take a moment and leave a comment…. I thank you in advance. Let’s explore those word clouds!"
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In 2005 Chuck Palahniuk began submitting original writing essays on craft to his official fan site ChuckPalahniuk.net. 36 essays later and Chuck had amassed a wealth of knowledge on his readers; tools and writing tenants that could fill a book!
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Google Docs Slide Share.
A compendium of clever ideas and techniques to stimulate quality, engaging writing...many with web 2.0 enablers. -JL
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By Corey Kilgannon (May 18, 2012)
"On Friday afternoon, about two dozen people met on a platform in the Times Square subway station, corralled by a man wearing a green T-shirt with the words “the system is whack.”
"The man, Aaron Zimmerman, is the executive director of the NY Writers Coalition, and he and several volunteers were leading one of several free writing workshops that the coalition was holding throughout the city on Friday, including one in Coney Island and another aboard the Staten Island Ferry.
"But this session was being held on a No. 7 train on a round trip to Flushing, Queens. The group boarded the first car of the train and Mr. Zimmerman’s first instruction to the writers was to “ride this to the end.”
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By Greta Munger
"When I read about the APS Wikipedia Initiative (APS WI) challenge to have students help correct Wikipedia, I thought it sounded like a really neat idea. To write a good Wikipedia article, the students need the same reading and research skills that my old assignment required with the advantage of contributing to the public good. Davidson College’s mission statement declares our intent “to assist students in developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service,” a sentiment shared by many colleges. I believe that careful and rigorous study of any discipline can support this, but there can be quite a distance between the classroom and the service for some of us. The APSWI changes that because part of civic engagement is providing accurate information to forums that are accessible to a larger community."
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A gold mine for sharing, learning, discussing (you get the idea). Tons of resources in curriculum, multimedia, applications, and events. The Teaching Writing group has 2764 members as of May 18, 2012. Sign up! -JL
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From Google
How to use the new Research Tool in Google Docs. -JL
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