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It was a meeting all about ideas (my favourite) and we discussed the best ways that technology could support the process of writing and drive the eventual outcomes. In this post I have included a list of 10 literacy/writing tools or outcomes that, in my opinion, teachers should currently be aware of. Many of them are basic yet still powerful tools in the classroom that support children’s writing. They are in no particular order.

For a while the NEA experimented with “belles-lettres,” a misunderstood term that favors style over substance and did not capture the personal essence and foundation of the literature they were seeking. Eventually one of the NEA members in the meeting that day pointed out that a rebel in his English department was campaigning for the term “creative nonfiction.” That rebel was me.

literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To p

real demarcation points between fiction, which is or can be mostly imagination; traditional nonfiction (journalism and scholarship), which is mostly information; and creative nonfiction, which presents or treats information using the tools of the fiction writer while maintaining allegiance to fact.

The Google for Educators community has nine lesson plans for teaching Internet search strategies. The lessons are divided into three modules. The lessons start with the basics and conclude with advanced search strategies.

Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects

rash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims

new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

The growing enthusiasm over value-added assessment, however, belies what is actually a damaging policy for public education. Value-added assessment promises, rather, to dismantle teachers' unions, deintellectualize teachers' jobs, to refashion schools according to corporate-profit-making initiatives and to burn out experienced teachers at ever faster rates. What its proponents fail to realize is that value added contributes to the destruction of public education by 1) participating in a broader corporate reform scheme of privatization and 2) objectifying knowledge, or turning knowledge into "things," that is, units that can be measured, compared and transmitted at the expense of genuine learning.

There are two basically different ideas of educational value at play in this debate. For proponents of value-added assessment, standardized tests contain certain, verifiable and numerically quantifiable knowledge. The tests are mistakenly thought to be objective.