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Today's youth are active creators and producers who use a wide range of digital tools to express themselves, interpret the world around them, and deepen their understanding of academic content. Their products include original music, animation, video, stories, graphics, presentations, and Web sites.

WHAT IS FUZZMAIL? Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter.

Curious about how complex your documents or Web pages are to read? You don't have to get a team of experts to generate your readability score: you can just use readability.info to analyze the characteristics of your writing and ascertain a multitude of readability scores. By comparing the readability score of different documents (or Web pages) you can better hone your writing and make sure that you aren't creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

Option for EAP students creating headers for blogs

Evaluating Student Portfolios At the end of the term/semester/year when the portfolio is submitted for summative evaluation, it is useful to review the contents as a whole and record data using the previously set criteria. One method of recording data is to prepare a grid with the criteria listed down one side and the checklist or rating scale across the top. If there is need to assign a numerical grade, designate numbers to each set of criteria on the checklist/rating scale and convert the evaluation into a number grade. Some examples of portfolio assessment and recording forms follow. The teacher can adapt these sample forms or create new ones.

First, writers will search for all four pieces of advice that young author, Eva, receives from her neighbors and then uses in her story found in the book Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street. Next, writers will apply the four pieces of advice as they brainstorm details about a person, place, and thing they have chosen to write about. Finally, writers will each create a descriptive paragraph that interestingly describes the person, place, and thing they have chosen.

"Teachers often would like to check the readability of a piece of writing. Edward Fry, formerly of the Rutgers University Reading Center, created one of the most widely used, and easy-to-use readability graphs for educators. Thanks go to McGraw-Hill for granting me permission to reproduce this information on the Web. (Taken from Fry, Edward.Elementary Reading Instruction. NY : McGraw Hill, 1977, p.217.) and most currently appearing in his book, The Reading Teachers Books of Lists (2006). Dr. Fry has let me know that the graph is copyright free, but one cannot alter the graph or directions and still call it the Fry Readability Graph. Thank you to Dr. Fry for letting me know teachers can use the graph, copyright free! "

This would be a fun activity for writing feature articles! Fun with any kind of writing, really. . .