Letters to the Next President

izzit.org is a site that provides interesting multimedia content for educational purposes. Their current events section features a daily item drawn from a national newspaper matched with a series of discussion questions. The selections would be interesting to students looking at the 'current topics of the day' and the newspaper items would provide models for writing. (Thank you, Lynne Culp, for the recommendation.)

Political ads provide a great starting point for both examining issues, their representation in the media, all things about 'spin.' The Washington Post maintains a searchable database of political ads from around the country, all searchable in dozens of ways. (Thanks to Chris Sloan for this recommendation.)

Both candidates have done their version of a "Letters to..." assignment by writing an essay to the nation's young people. Find their essays in the Teaching Tolerance Magazine, published by-annually by Teaching Tolerance. (Thanks go to Lynne Culp for suggesting these essays.)

This webpage, part of the UNC Writing Center tutorials, gives students great advice on editing and proofreading. The page could be easily printed and shared with students, and might have even more cache coming from a college writing center. If you like this 'handout', you'll find many others written for students on topics related to academic writing.

Journaiists take copy-editing seriously; so it is no surprise that sites for journalists collect resources on editing and correctness. This link takes you to a combination of advice and great links to further advice. One stop shopping on editing and proofreading tips.

Daily Writing Tips is a website with advice for writers and copy-editors and appeals to bloggers and other professional writers. The site publishes a wealth of short articles and collections of tips written directly to the writer. Because it is searchable, it provides busy writers (and their teachers) with a direct route to advice that might be relevant to the piece of writing at hand.

It is not uncommon for beginning writers to adopt an overly wordy style when trying to do 'academic writing.' This page at Newsroom 101 provides an easy way to make a point about the perils of wordiness. The page asks what would happen'If Bureaucrats Wrote Ads'? A series of wordy translations of popular ads and slogans are arranged in an interactive way. The bureaucratic version is followed by an invitation to guess the ad. For example, "It is advisable to effect an expeditious execution of your present project on the earliest timeline, with the purpose of facilitating achievement of the goals implicit in your intentions." is Nike's "just do it." Project this to your class and have fun guessing.

Scott McCloud, who blogs at Dangerously Irrelevant, has tagged some of his colleague education bloggers to write their own letters to the president. You can find McCloud's challenge and links to some of their writing here.

What's left to say after this seemingly endless campaign? The NYT Op-Ed editors asked five poets to answer that question. Their poems appear beautifully in the online edition.

Those who watched Obama's acceptance speech know that one of this biggest promises was that the family would be getting a puppy. In this story, readers can follow the complexities of choosing the nation's "first dog." Could be very appealing to students who would find the choice of a new puppy as compelling as the issue in L2P.

For fans of tag clouds and Wordle, the NYT has a fascinating feature that invites readers to submit one word that describes their state of mind. These words are then 'clouded' and time stamped to provide a visual sense of the nation's state of mind over time.

A visit to Ft. Washington High School, a DC area high school, to talk with students about their feelings after the election. The video reactions posted in the Ning are from this piece.

In this human interest piece, the Washington Post takes a look at African American staff in the White House. Focusing on a butler who served under eight presidents, the piece looks at the evolution of race relations in DC. A photo essay is included.

This website features extensive letters and policy recommendations from the Fellows of the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University.