Tips by Tony

Interactive Fiction (IF) is a type of story where the player uses text commands to control the main character and influence the environment, and is often used to refer to text adventures. IF can be used to simulate an historical event or location, or to create an entirely new fictional environment.

There’s no question the Twilight series of books from Stephanie Meyer has taken the world by storm. Teen and pre-teen girls as well as gown women are swooning over Edward and his hunky vampire brethren. The second movie in the series, New Moon opened last night to packed theaters. I’ve spoken with several educators who are big fans of the series. The problem is, Twilight is bad for kids (and adults.) The writing is horrible and the message the books send to young girls is all wrong, which is why the books should be studied in school.

While you can certainly do serious writing with a word processing application (MS Word, OpenOffice, Pages, etc.,) there’s an entire class of application aimed specifically at the process of writing.

These are just a few of the articles I found interesting last week. This week’s crop looks at literacy and Language Arts, accountability in education, ‘No Chile Left Behind,’ a free digital magazine, and how the web and weblog have changed writing.