Writing Prompt: Thesaurus Abuse Visit a thesaurus website (like Thesaurus.com), or grab a thesaurus from your book shelf if you have one. Search or flip through until you find five preposterously verbose, bombastic, grandiloquent alternati...
We’re smack in the middle of NaNoWriMo, and some of us are probably a little bit behind on our word count—definitely, definitely not me, but you know, some of us. Cough. Right. Anyway, it’s time to pick up the pace: This piece from t...
Good evening from Nebraska where I’m visiting my good friends Kris and Beth Still. Some of you may remember that Beth was the person who organized the NECC Newbie Project back in 2009 to get me to the NECC (now called ISTE) conference...
Anyone who has ever spent a Sunday afternoon grading essay after essay has at some point wondered, “did anyone listen when I explained homophones?” This usually happened to me around the 27th essay of the day. It’s at about that point...
This Sunday is Veterans Day (many places will observe it on Monday). The following resources can help students understand the origins and meaning of Veterans Day including how it is different from Memorial Day. Bet You Didn’t Know: Ve...
Genre: Urban FantasySetting: Modern day America My antagonist is a Catholic priest who has the limited supernatural ability to know that Hell is a very real place and damnation can happen. He’s furious that that people treat the trapp...
I recommended some books to Theglasshouse but not to everyone in the forum. So, since these books would probably be helpful in developing good prose style, I thought I should share them with you. One is called “Building Great Sentence...
Using examples from William Peter Blatty’s iconic horror novel The Exorcist, Dustin Grinnell explains how to craft truly frightening horror fiction by blending the believable and the unsettlingly extraordinary. In the novel The Exorcist ...
This week Microsoft unveiled a slew of new accessibility options for the services that teachers and students use most. One of those features is the inclusion of Immersive Reader in Flipgrid. Immersive Reader is a free service that students ...
The transition from high school to post-secondary can be challenging. I was no exception. I didn’t do poorly, however, I know I didn’t take advantage of the opportunities post-secondary education had to offer. While I had a good start t...