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David Warlick at 2¢ Worth lays out some simple points on writing to communicate. These tips apply particularly well to writing for an online audience where page width can range from around 8 inches to at least twice that, making for extremely long lines, and where typical visual landmarks/cues, like left and right pages, page edges, and page numbering, are absent.

The four key ideas he mentions are:

• Write in short paragraphs, separate by lots of white space
• Any list of items that accedes two, should be bulleted
• Headings and subheadings should hang out over the paragraphs that follow
• If an idea can be effectively conveyed with an image, then it should be conveyed with an image

These are relatively straight-forward ideas, but they don’t follow the traditional form of essays and many other print mediums. Writing for online publication is a different medium and brings with it different nuances.

For more detailed descriptions of Warlick’s four points, see his complete posting, Writing to Communicate, at 2¢ Worth

[via TechLearning.com]

Harry Grover Tuttle, writing for TechLearning, offers 14 tips for integrating technology to enhance reading instruction.

Some suggestions require more specific resources or are incompatible with our filtering, but several can be implemented in essentially any classroom setting with commonly available computing tools.

Target grades: Varied

I came across and briefly found myself addicted to this language arts resource this summer.

“Word Frog provides practice in matching antonyms, synonyms, and homonyms.

The target word appears on the frog, with the word category underneath, defining the relationship to be matched.”

The producers of this resource, Arcademic, have other word and math games available, but I haven’t taken the opportunity to preview those to see if they are of similar quality. These are primarily geared toward an elementary audience.