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Thinking more about the idea of creating a high quality curriculum resource that is open, I have focused in on writing as a subject matter. Why? First and foremost, I love writing and think it has the ability to transform lives. Beyond that, it transfers to all other subject areas and grade levels, and success in writing is correlated to success in many other endeavors. Writing is fun and rewarding. Technology can greatly enhance writing skills for many.

PeerCentered is a space for peer writing tutors/consultants or anyone interested in writing centers to blog with their colleagues from around the world. Bloggers here will share their ideas, experiences, or insight. PeerCentered also features a podcast. If you are interested participating in the podcast, contact Clint.

The Text Machine is an application that allows instructors to correct, mark up, comment on, and grade electronic writing assignments. The TM generates rich, detailed, error-specific feedback on essays, compositions, term papers and other written work, all with the click of a mouse. At the same time, your software manages crucial data on students' writing abilities, making the Text Machine an indispensable tool for the assessment of learning objectives.

"The project studies the diagnosis of reading and writing abilities in a second or foreign language. It seeks to identify the cognitive features which predict a learner's strengths and weaknesses in those areas. The project brings together scholars from applied linguistics, psychology and assessment to engage in multidisciplinary work and to develop innovative ways of diagnosing the development of second and foreign language abilities. The main contribution of the project will be to offer novel, well-grounded theoretical insights and to develop a range of methodologies to study second and foreign language development and its diagnosis. We are exploring the causes underlying strengths and weaknesses in language development, and the relationship between literacy skills in one's first language and the development of second language abilities. The results of the project will also have practical implications by providing a sounder theoretical basis for the development of curricula, pedagogic materials and diagnostic tests."

A free product (iRubric) that helps make writing assignments less subjective and more understandable to students is saving Santa Ana College Professor John Howe huge amounts of time and helping him grade writing assignments much more consistently.

"This customizable easy to use toolbar (See the toolbar in action in its video tour) seamlessly integrates with familiar applications including Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, and Adobe Reader, allowing students to access the support tools they need from within mainstream software programs. It highlights and reads text aloud using natural sounding voices and also includes a comprehensive set of support tools for reading, writing, studying, research, and test taking. Read&Write GOLD allows teachers to provide the differentiated instruction that is necessary to meet the needs of diverse student populations and ensure that all students reach their potential and achieve success. "

The International Corpus of Learner English (Version 2) is a corpus of writing by higher intermediate to advanced learners of English. It contains 3.7 million words of EFL writing from learners representing 16 different mother tongue backgrounds (Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Tswana). It differs from the first version published in 2002 not only by its increased size and range of learner populations, but also by its interface, which contains two new functionalities: built-in concordancer allowing users to search for word forms, lemmas and/or part-of-speech tags and breakdown of the query results according to the learner profile information.

TAGARELA is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system designed to be fully integrated into the Portuguese Individualized Instruction Program at The Ohio State University. It can be viewed as an intelligent automatic workbook that provides students with opportunities to practice their reading, listening, and writing skills. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access. TAGARELA uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to analyze students' input, and detect spelling, morphological, syntactic and semantic errors. Its NLP components allow the system to handle activities that go beyond the usual multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks used by regular CALL systems. Its exercise types are similar to the ones typically found in current workbooks, such as: * listening and reading comprehension * picture description * vocabulary practice * phrasing and re-writing TAGARELA has a student model that keeps track of each student's individual performance, and an instructor model that carries information about activity and error types. Together the student and instructor models allow the system to choose the best feedback strategy to use with each individual learner based on the level of the activity, type of task, characteristics of error, and learner profile.

Improve your listening skills and hear about the news. Listen-and-write.com is free listening practice. Users can create and use dictation exercises and track their scores

"Hosted by: Dr. Abigail Grant Scheg (Elizabeth State University) Date: November 29, 2012 Text messaging, in and out of the classroom, is often viewed as a negative communicative mode which results in poor grammar and poor idea representation, let alone student procrastination from more important projects. However, as Web 2.0 technologies increase in number and popularity, these tools are changing the face of education, business, and communication at large. This session will discuss the pedagogical possibilities using text messaging and ways to incorporate texting into the classroom or as part of a class in a way that will make the instructor feel comfortable. Starting with the idea that our students are experts in the technology of text messaging, this session will allow the instructor to utilize students' skills in a positive light rather than dismiss them as unimportant. In this presentation, author Dr. Abigail Grant Scheg will discuss her IGI Global chapter, Textperts: Utilizing Students' Skills in the Teaching of Writing. Her research explores both the theoretical and practical implementations of text messaging into the composition of the classroom with careful consideration of the positive and negative impacts."

Blog post with idea of using Google Drawings for handwriting practice: "Google's Drawing program is the perfect platform to practice orthography- the skill of writing characters and symbols to create words- in language classrooms with non-Roman alphabets, such as Arabic or Chinese."

"Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie's goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing, redefine the notion of a book or academic paper to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation. Sophie 2.0 is being rewritten in Java, and the Sophie Reader will be browser-based, offering even easier access to - and sharing of - Sophie projects. Sophie 2.0 will also allow the embedding of Sophie Books as applets on any Web page, and the new version will support Adobe Flash. In addition, Sophie 2.0 will be accompanied by full-scale support for an emerging Sophie user community."

An online tool for submitting writing assignments, checking for plagiarism, coordinating peer review and grading. Allows instructors to set up rubrics and link peer review and grading to these rubrics.

PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture.

Itoh, R. (2006). Handwriting Technology and Future of Writing Instruction for Japanese Language. In T. Reeves & S. Yamashita (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2006 (pp. 609-612). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Kanji alive is a free, web-based tool to help beginning and intermediate level Japanese language learners to read and write kanji. It is cross-platform and will run in any browser that supports Adobe Flash and Apple Quicktime. Please Note: The current version of Kanji alive available on this site is an initial beta or pilot version. We are making it available now in order to solicit comments and suggestions from our users. It is not a dictionary: only searches for individual kanji, not words. Shows character in font and animation of handwriting, on/kunyomi, audio clips & translations of associated compound words, radicals, stroke count and breakdown, and grade level/reference numbers for kanji lists.

The Generation 1.5 project was launched in 2006 by a small group of researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) English Language Institute (ELI). We are collecting texts from writers who are just starting their academic careers at the university, specifically 1st and 2nd year undergraduates, who speak a variety of Korean or Chinese at home. Ultimately, the aim of this data collection is to provide an empirical basis for developing recommendations for writing/language instruction specialized for the Generation 1.5 group.

Skritter is a study system for Chinese and Japanese characters. You draw a character stroke by stroke and it gives feedback and tracks your progress. Character lists from 99 textbooks built into the site.

Language, teaching & text software - TOOLS: * PhraseContext:Text analysis tool, writing tool, collocation analysis, concordancing, text and XML output, and much more. * Calculator Calculate T-score, Z-score and Mutual Information. (Free) * Simpel Grammatik - grammar teaching software (only in Danish) (Free) * Convert : Extract text from PDF-files (Free) * Tokeniser - a small freeware utility. (Free) * Some Object Pascal/Delphi string routines

Stanford Humanities Fellow Edith Sheffer had an idea of how she could personalize history for her students. This led to an innovative use of the wiki. The following are highlights from a conversation in January 2009 about her course "Germany and the World Wars, 1870-1990.″. The idea was to have a writing assignment that would function like weekly response papers but be slightly more interesting to the students. Each student would create his or her own character that was born in 1900 and be in complete control of their persona. Beyond the initial introductory sentence that gave their parent's occupation, and birthplace and gender, they could make life choices.