Education Professor of Practice Joan Shin has received the 2013 Ben Warren International House Trust Prize for her book Teaching Young Learners English (National Geographic Learning/Cengage Learning, 2013). Shin coauthored the book with JoAnn Crandall, Professor Emerita and former Director of the Language, Literacy and Culture Ph.D. program.

The prestigious award is given annually to the author or authors of the most outstanding work in the field of language teacher education. The Ben Warren International House Trust was created as a memorial to the work and life of Ben Warren, who was a leader in developing the world’s leading language teaching organization.

Shin’s book was published last year. It teaches English as a foreign language to young children and presents practical suggestions and best practices for teachers to engage young learners.

The award was announced in Barcelona, Spain on Saturday, February 8. You can read more about the announcement here. You can also find more information on Shin’s book series with National Geographic Learning here.

In light of the blizzard enveloping the east coast of the US at the moment… we thought a little snow humor would be welcome. 

Every designer’s toolbox needs a few new goodies every now and then, to keep it up to date. Selecting the right tools, be they brushes, vector art or Photoshop actions is a key design skill that can mean the difference between delivering quality work and missing your deadlines altogether.

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The vintage-inspired swooshes add an old-school americana feel to just about any type, and the drips and splashes add a great craft-feel to your projects.

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Which of these design elements look the best to you? What uses would you have for them? Let us know in the comments.

Create Picture-Perfect Portraits With Beautune – only $14!

The CSS Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published a Working Draft of CSS Masking Module Level 1. CSS Masking provides two means for partially or fully hiding portions of visual elements: masking and clipping. Masking describes how to use another graphical element or image as a luminance or alpha mask. Typically, rendering an element via CSS or SVG can conceptually be described as if the element, including its children, are drawn into a buffer and then that buffer is composited into the element’s parent. Luminance and alpha masks influence the transparency of this buffer before the compositing stage. Clipping describes the visible region of visual elements. The region can be described by using certain SVG graphics elements or basic shapes. Anything outside of this region is not rendered. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. Learn more about the Style Activity and the Graphics Activity.