Teachers are always flat out getting a job done. Here are some ways Scribo lightens the load.

Formative Assessment Ideas - just a few!

1. Get students writing with Scribo feedback support. In Google or Word Add-ins, Students have access to Scribo feedback and guidance as they write. You will see the advice Scribo is giving along the way. This feedback greatly reduces the busy work teachers get caught up in giving, multiple times to several students.

2. Set up an Activity Context that works across a unit of work or curriculum item. Writing an assignment can be an at-home event or in-class. Monitor both with Live Monitoring and check on student progress. Give feedback as writing progresses in class. Monitor student writing plans and scaffold completion.

3. Drop in to see any student's progress and writing Live – see what's happening, look for students at risk or falling behind the cohort. Look at the number of revisions it has taken students to get to where they are now.

4. Transform live writing insights into a class panel report giving you a deep dive into teachable moments, discussion points. Use collaboration time with students to live-explore examples of text from the class, with the class.

5. Encourage students to self-grade against the marking rubric. Teachers can offer rubric estimates back using the Rubric as a marking continuum rather than a destination.

Give students more ownership

1. Let students access to Scribo in late primary and secondary to profile and check their work before they hand it to you. Scribo - Scriblet supports a primary interface that simplifies access and feedback.

2. Always ask students to check their work in Scribo. Teachers can see the feedback that students receive from Scribo and if they have implemented advice. Always look for ways to have students engage in their own writing development.

3. Let students run writing checks for their work and work through suggested improvements. Teachers have full view of what Scribo is suggesting.

4. Let students grade themselves against the marking rubric. Students can estimate where they think they deserve grades. There are conversations that spring from this!

5. Let students see the version history of their text. Many times students get lost in versions and tinkering with text. Versions are saved every time student run a writing check.

Summative Assessment ideas

Create a writing question context, assign to the class and turn off Student Writing Check and keywords. Students have a cold writing environment to work in. Teachers can Live Monitor progress.

1. Teachers join classes to share grading loads.

2. Use online Rubric grading in Scribo.

3. Print students' writing reports when assessments are final.

The jobs Scribo helps teachers do ...

• Put Learners at the heart of teaching and learning

• Scaffold and model the processes involved in idea generation, development and revision

• Lift Engagement to encourage students to practice writing texts often

• Encourage students to self direct their learning

• Differentiate Instruction for students at all levels

• Deliver personalised feedback to students in seconds

• Support the development of writing skills and elements of writing

• Enact Peer Review to open ideas and student to student support / collaboration

• Shape collaborative learning through examples and discussion

• Target feedback for learning levels with personalised feedback and guidance

• Integrate a range of techniques and technologies to create texts

• Track student performance across elements of writing

• Drive outcomes for students by giving them more ownership in their learning

• Have more time for themselves

... are supported across 4 core teaching processes

WRITING IS MADE UP OF MANY ELEMENTS – COMBINE THE PIECES THAT MATTER MOST FOR SUCCESS. SCRIBO SUPPORTS THEM ALL.

When you get your head around this concept, the idea of uncovering the jobs educators do and how products and services get delivered makes intuitive sense. The way technology engages educators and learners begins to make more sense as well.

Scribo Platform Highlights

What is Scribo?

For Educators, Scribo saves time supporting and developing student writing skills. Scribo gives key student feedback and discovering where instruction is needed through better information. It is well acknowledged that to improve writing skills, students need to write more. More writing needs more educator feedback, more feedback means more time. No one has more time. Educators need more support from technology to invest more of their available time Teaching.

"Scribo gives me more time to be a better teacher" G Suppiah - Dean - Score Campus

For students, Scribo is an AI driven, intelligent online writing assistant giving them personalised feedback and guidance on their writing, in seconds. Scribo works across multiple levels of analysis showing where and how students could improve their writing and lift overall quality.

How does Scribo build stronger writing connections with students?

Scribo connects educators to students as they work. Educators can live monitor student progress with the ability to add feedback quickly and simply. This opens 'journey' based monitoring and mentoring for teachers adding value to student writing outcomes while saving time for teachers.

Scribo connects automatic student feedback with teacher visibility of the same feedback. This connection and gathering of data as students write helps teacher quickly see where students need more targeted teaching support.

What is the main benefit of Scribo to students?

Without doubt, the two most loved features of Scribo are :

1. instant, personalised feedback that helps students improve the quality of their writing. Scribo gives students ement in which they feel supported and encouraged to improve and be more authentic writers.

2. students have more ownership in their writing development. Educators and students see an increase in student submission quality simply through students having more ownership in their writing. Leaders love the supporting benchmark data and it’s value as evidence to support programs of development.

Where does Scribo fit in the school "IT - Product" landscape?

Technology in schools is a busy and complex environment. There are student management systems, Learning Management Systems, plagiarism checks, grading systems and more. Many systems are based around the logistics of work product.

Scribo does not have to be integrated into the conga line of technology logistics to make an impact on supporting and improving student writing. Why? Because writing is what students do alone, 99% of the time under the radar of academic oversight. Scribo works with students directly and improves the visibility of student progress for educators.

SOLO MODE is where Students create their text and receive feedback

Each student's Word or Google Docs environment is typically where they work, from when they are given a written task to when they hand the work in. The Student Writing Zone is where Scribo works, supporting them directly as they work alone using the platforms they always work in like Google and Office. It's logical that this environment can be supported by what we call SOLO mode. Students feel supported, and advice is consistent and free flowing.

CONNECTED MODE

If educators want to be involved in the writing/creation journey of their students, Scribo has a Connected Mode. In connected mode, educators 'connect' to the live writing of students, contributing live feedback and watching over at-risk students. Scribo delivers live analytics to academic staff, tracking improvement and many other metrics that can be used for efficacy, proof of value and evidence.

How do students access Scribo?

Scribo is available for students either on the Web or in Google Docs or WORD O365 as an Add-On.

Scribo can be run in SOLO mode by students with no connected educator oversight. In SOLO mode students do not have to be connected to a class or teacher.

How does Scribo support guidance for student writing?

Scribo lets educators link writing plans, scaffolds and support materials students access when writing with Scribo. Scribo also gives students scaffolding tools to help them plan their work. Scaffolds are used to differentiate support offered to various students as they write.

Can Students use Scribo for any type of writing task?

Scribo is suitable for question and text response. There is no limitation on course type or subject matter. When students enter the question prompt, Scribo automatically discovers the context of the question, isolating the keywords, task and limiting words for the essay. Scribo uses these parameters to guide students in the essay response analysis.

Does Scribo analyse writing styles and voice?

Yes, Scribo analyses over 16 different writing styles, including three 'voices', to check if students have followed the question requirements and answered the question. Scribo tracks the efficiency of over 16 different writing styles like Compare, Contrast, Expand Ideas, Give Examples, Cause and Effect, Expand Ideas, Quote and more. Students can select the styles they want to check.

Can Scribo do an analysis of all students in the course?

Scribo reads all students’ texts and creates a multi-layer analysis of cohort writing. With these insights, educators see across live examples of student work. Teachable moments are ready, examples from live text are extracted ready for lesson planning, and deep analysis and insights are created in minutes across all students.

What types of grading does Scribo support?

Scribo supports very flexible Rubric marking – from your Rubric definitions, not ours. Letter grading and number based X/Y grading as a number or percentage is supported. Students can self grade against a Rubric. Rubric grading supports multiple revisions meaning Scibo can be used for marking drafts.

How does Scribo support feedback on student work?

5 automated feedback capabilities of Scribo include:

1. Extensive feedback on writing is generated automatically, paragraph by paragraph. Students rate this feedback as sensational.

2. Educators can ‘drop’ text based feedback onto student work as they work.

3. Feedback can be spoken – full voice to text capability.

4. Feedback libraries can be used to shortcut common feedback points.

5. Feedback statistics are available to Educators instantly with one click.

Can Scribo support Summative Writing tasks?

Summative writing tasks are used extensively in Scribo. Students are given a topic, possibly a supporting scaffold, and a neutral writing space to address the question. This writing space has no spell checking or grammar checking support. Educators finally see the levels of writing in a cohort as they really are. All data flows into analysis and feedback.

Scribo AI auto grades the summative writing tasks, further reducing the load on teachers. Simply get students writing and hand over the texts to AI grading. Seconds later, the grading and data analysis is complete.

Can Scribo be used for any course and subject?

Yes. Scribo can be used across all faculty subjects at all levels of learning. Differences in feedback include the level of the feedback, the depth of the question answer and obviously the student response.

Is Scribo a cloud hosted system?

Yes, Scribo is delivered to Schools and Colleges via the cloud. Anyone can log in from anywhere there is a web connection, and your login email or user account can be validated. All data is stored in Country of Origin.

Can Scribo support SSO with Google and O365?

Yes, Scribo integrates with both. Your primary Google or O365 account can create a Scribo account with single click access – no new passwords. Register with Google and/or Microsoft accounts from the Register screen.

Does Scribo use AI and ML technology?

Yes, Scribo uses Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence extensively to make every student and educators’ life easier. All feedback generated by Scribo for students is created using our NLP, ML and AI technology. The data created is kept confidential and unique to the context of your School / Scribo Community. Data that is shared and used to aggregate and inference learning data across all writing is used in anonymity.

Can Scribo integrate with O365 and Teams?

Yes, Scribo is fully integrated with O365 and Teams. Educators can synchronize courses and activities in one click utilising the powerful remote chat capabilities of Teams to include students. Scribo is an Add-on available from the Microsoft Store.

Planning to run feedback online is a topical scenario now with COVID-19 being an everyday reality. Scribo can easily facilitate tutor - student feedback without any need for personal contact. Using O365 and or Google Docs with Scribo makes the feedback process native and simple to set up.

Can Scribo work inside Google Docs and Word O365?

Yes. Scribo is an Add-on in both platforms. Scribo for G-Suite works in Docs, Scribo for O365 works in Word without forcing students away from their authoring platform of choice. Scribo for Teams links collaboration around a cohort, enabling sharing and support to be built into the writing process.

Can Scribo work with course keys for quick registration?

Yes, Student and course keys are the quickest way to get students on-boarded. If you use O365 and/or Google register using SSO and enter a key. Instantly your course is ready to go and students can quickly join.

Does Scribo require plugins for the Browser?

No, Scribo is HTML 5 delivered. There are no plugins required and Scribo works with all major browsers.

Does Scribo integrate with SIS and LMS Systems?

Scribo integrates with SIS and timetable systems directly. Integration with LMS is via LTI launch.

Can Scribo data support BI platforms?

Scribo data can be exported in BI formats for further analysis. We have a direct link from our Ledger platform to Power BI and Tableau or other BI tools and platforms.

Introduction

Each student has a level of writing skills, each teacher has a level of writing instruction skills. These skills join as teachers and students work together in natural feedback loops. The problem with manual feedback loops is they consume teacher time and change with the diversity of student specific needs.

How do teachers cope without some respite from the continuous hours of discovery and feedback in the interaction loops they build with students? According to McKinsey, humanities teachers already work 10-15 hours overtime a week. It can be quite dis-heartening when many hours do not lead to improved results.

WHAT IS SCRIBO?

Ultimately Scribo helps English and humanities teachers save time getting their job done. There are many benefits Scribo can deliver, all of them designed to help teachers do their job in less time, with better information.

How do I register my School with Literatu and get Scribo access?

To use Scribo, Schools must register with Literatu. Scribo is NOT a free service, however it can be trialed FREE for 21 days for up to 50 students in a class. We encourage the use of a single School Community for multiple educator accounts.

If you would like to register for a Scribo Trial and your school has an 'edu' or 'org' in the domain address you can register with this link :

https://www.literatu.com/#/signup/scribo-school

How do I register educators and students?

Educators and students register using community / class access keys or via our Literatu university on-boarding process. Scribo integrates directly with LTI, O365, Google, Google Classroom and LDAP protocols to establish educator, student access, courses and accounts. If you have any of these, please let us know. For the purposes of a trial, we issue an Educator registration code. Educators create courses and give students course key codes to self register.

Can students register via Single Sign On (SSO)?

Students can SSO (Single Sign On) in Scribo using their O365 or Google account. With a Student Access code, registration into a course is simple and fast.

Can students register for a trial directly?

Yes. Students can register and login to Scribo for a live trial. They are taken on a tour of Scribo and encouraged to try Scribo live. https://www.literatu.com/#/signup

What level of student does Scribo apply to?

Scribo is used in all levels of K12 education to check and promote writing skills and techniques. Scribo does this through:

• Active writing connections to students with immediate feedback and analysis powered by the Scribo AI and ML engine.

• Live connections between students and tutors to help reduce the time taken for current feedback and guidance.

• Integrated Data analytics that find and highlight where targeted support could have an immediate impact on student writing.

A writing activity in Scribo is a 'context' in which teachers and students come together to improve writing.

Write an essay on "The Spanish Flu".

Write an essay on "The Life of Pi and how a story can carry such intensity and sadness".

There are no limits on writing topics and interests. One thing is certain though – the objective of each sentence is to make you want to read the next one.

Writing is arguably the single most important skill a person can have after the ability to read.

The CONTEXT of an Activity in Scribo defines parameters of engagement around:

• The expectation of targets, type and style

• How it is planned to be used – formative or summative

• How it will be supported with resources and scaffolds

• How students engage in writing – integrated or solo, Google or Cold Writing?

• How feedback will work – revisions, live monitoring

• How collaboration inside the cohort will work

• How it is graded and how feedback is handed back

• How it is analysed to identify growth and target specific skill gaps

The pedagogical objectives behind Planning and Organising Writing

Rubric Features

Background

Rubrics are one of the most powerful tools for helping students develop their writing skills. Used before writing takes place, rubrics provide a roadmap to guide students along defined criteria. Used for self-evaluation before submitting their work, rubrics engage students in reflecting on their strengths and where they can improve, thus encouraging ownership of their capabilities. Finally, when teachers use rubrics to assess students, feedback is clear, defined and usually shows where further growth can occur. Using rubrics in Scribo is easy, streamlined and effective.

Using Another’s Rubric

You might be using Scribo where another teacher has shared a rubric, or one is available from a library (eg. the NAPLAN library). In this case, all you have to do is choose a rubric while in the Activity Setup screen.

How to add an Existing Rubric to your Activity

1. Simply scroll to the lower section of the Activity Setup screen and choose a rubric from the list. For a rubric to appear in the list, you must either load it or it is available for the community (see below).

2. Use the Preview icon to see the rubric’s criteria and descriptors.

   Here is an animation showing this:

How to upload a Rubric

1. Find or create a rubric in either a table or spreadsheet. Notice that two heading rows are needed. One for descriptor and one for value.

2. Copy the rubric by dragging across/highlighting each section, then choose Copy from the menu, mouse or keyboard commands.

3. Navigate to the Rubric screen – Scribo main, Rubrics (left menu), then look for the down arrow in the green “Add Rubric” button. Click this arrow.

4. A Pop-up window will appear. Simply “Paste” the copied rubric and watch it magically appear in the pop-up window.

5. Name the Rubric.

6. Notice the important message that opens. This is letting you know that you should make sure your criteria either align with pre-selected criteria or you should choose your own. This “mapping” is very helpful because it groups similar criteria together so that, for instance, if three people use slightly different headings for paragraphs (e.g., “paragraph,” “paragraphing,” “paragraphs”) instead of three separate categories for the same thing, you only have one. This is very useful when tracking growth across the criteria.

7. Finally, add values so that Scribo can automatically generate a score from your feedback based on your rubric.

Sharing a Rubric across your Community

By importing your rubric as above, you can now use it with your students. Rubrics are even more powerful when they are shared. This means people are saving time, which is great of course, but by sharing rubrics, you and your colleagues are also working more systemically. Thus the criteria you set can be used across year levels, stages or subject areas. By doing this, students are encouraged to work to consistent standards that are supported across the school, not just one teacher.

How to share a Rubric

1. From the main Rubric screen, you may likely see only the new rubric you’ve just uploaded. Notice there are no rubrics in the Community tab.

2. If you try to share your rubric, you get a message asking you to add a year and subject.

3. After doing this, you can now share the rubric. It is immediately available to any teachers in your community.

Keywords

Ideally, each question should have keywords which –

1. Help Scribo check if students have answered the question, built a thesis statement

2. Help to highlight repetition in answers

3. Help students look for synonyms

Students see Keywords in the Student Writing Check

Writing Styles

Scribo supports the identification of 22 writing styles across student writing.

Points to Note

1. Scribo picks up Writing Styles from the question. Styles are typically VERBS that we identify, match and activate. If they are not selected automatically, along with Keywords, you can select the most appropriate ones yourself.

2. Each Style is linked to rhetorical language transitions – a bunch of simple, advanced and complex transitional phrases. When they are used in writing they enact directional changes, pivot language and hopefully answer the question.

3. When students check their writing, Scribo tags all of the rhetorical transitions used to Compare, Contrast etc. These highlights are identified in the text, colour coded and tagged for easy identification.

4. If students have been asked to compare and contrast a view or opinion, they can see quickly where their transitions have or have not answered the question. For some reason, there is always more compare than contrast!

Writing Plans

Writing Plans / Essay Planners are scaffolds that prompt and guide students in planning a response to the question.

Where are they attached to an Activity?

Essay Plans are linked to an Activity Context. If you want students to access an Essay Plan or Writing Plan, attach a Plan to the Activity for them.

Essay Plans are attached in Activity setup.

Essay Planners have pre-set formats that can include prompts and pre-loaded advice

Rules and Features

Essay Plans are set up by Literatu (though in the future you will be able to add your own plans). We add the framework headings if we don't have one that suits.

1. Plans are attached to an Activity.

2. The same plan goes out to each student who is assigned the Activity.

3. You can "pre-load some suggestions" in Plans. These suggestions inside the Plan framework go to the students when the Activity is assigned.

4. Keywords really help the planning process. Keywords are set up in the Activity.

5. You can change the target word counts that default with each plan.

6. You can speak to the Plan to record suggestions – use the microphone if you have Chrome.

7. You can add and delete paragraphs to the Plan before it is assigned.

8. You can rename Paragraph Sections to suit your intent and terminology.

Topic – Stimulus

The writing stimulus can be anything at all. The stimulus is set up in the Activity Context and is seen by students via TOPIC.

A Writing Stimulus can include :

• A picture, or series of pictures

• Writing prompts to get ideas for writing underway

• Videos to watch

Where are they found?

Scaffolds are created from the Scribo Main Menu. They are linked to Activities to add context to what you are trying to do and how you are supporting students.

Scaffolds differentiate learning support

The level of support you give to students as they work can be adjusted by a scaffold. Scaffolds that give much, or little, advice and guidance to students can be linked at student level when the scaffold is assigned.

• Maybe you have ESL Students that need more support with additional videos and images, or some bi-lingual support?

• Maybe you have resources in Google and Web links that you can add for some students.

• Maybe you want to set up a WEB Quest (a bit old fashioned) that lets students follow along a pathway in Google Docs or Word. Scaffolds come through in the Google Doc Add-in and Word.

• Remember you can share Scaffolds across the school.

• Make Scaffolds public and share them across the District.

Scaffolds offer much flexibility to help students

• Scaffolds are super flexible. If you can format a page of text, you can build a Scaffold.

  • Cut and paste

  • Build the scaffold on screen

  • Add Checklists!

• Scaffolds are shared across three levels.

  • Private (My Scaffolds)

  • Community Scaffolds

  • Public Scaffolds

• You can copy any scaffold and make it yours

• You can share yours with the Community

• Tag the Scaffold so people can find it

  • Name – Give it a good name

  • Type – We have a drop down menu

  • Subject – What subject uses this type of Scaffold?

  • Years – What years does it apply to?

• Scaffolds save as you work – just like Google

• Use Emojis to make it look cool (Windows Key plus)

Connecting and differentiating Scaffold support for students

Manage Scaffolds

1. Scaffolds are managed from the main Scribo menu.

Assign different Scaffolds to different students

1. Go into the Activity you want to assign.

2. Go to the Student Experience Section – select Setup Scaffold.

3. Link the Scaffold you want to be the DEFAULT ONE FOR ALL STUDENTS for this Activity.

4. View and make sure you have the right one.

5. If there are students that need more/less/different Scaffolds, then select the Scaffold for each of these students individually.

How does a student see a Scaffold?

When a student goes into Scribo and opens the Activity, the Scaffold forms part of their context. Differentiated scaffolds, if set up, launch for different students.

Writing Instruction – a continuous task Scribo helps you do

There are many elements and jobs to be supported when it comes to writing instruction.

The pedagogical objectives behind Instruct Writing

Select Read Text

Reading text back is a great way to 'listen for errors'. Students can listen in a range of languages if they wish.

All options are built into the control behind the icons on the top right.

Versions show the writing journey

Teachers and students can see the journey of writing versions. These versions are stored each time a Writing Check is done by a student.

If your feedback is not inspiring any advance in a student's writing, that's a problem. Seeing how much writing students can get through is an interesting metric, and seeing how students progress their writing is interesting as well.

Deleted text is red, added text is green. The most current is on the left.

1. All Versions going back to day 1 are available

2. Show or Hide the Difference

3. Restore a Version

4. Close Versions

With Activity options set, students get the level of support and experience teachers want them to have.

Core Components

1. Activities To Do – any writing tasks that students have been assigned will be shown by class. Classes are shown along the top. Each Student also has a private Class where they can do student based writing checks with topics and activities that are outside of the teacher-led activities.

2. Everything that is Complete is kept. All history and feedback is online, all the time.

3. Open the Activity.

4. Students can create their own personal Writing Checks, outside of the Activity context teachers assign. A Commerce student might use this, even though his or her Commerce teacher does not.

5. Each Student gets Writing Insights that show where they have made errors and where they have reduced them with Scribo.

Student Writing Check – the Detail

1. Navigation

Activity setup options enable the features available to the students.

This student has the full complement of features, EXCEPT Show Keywords

• Writing Check

• Rubric Marking

• Feedback

• Writing Plan

• Scaffold

If the Show Keywords option had been enabled, they would be shown under Topic.

2. The Targets

Each Essay/Writing Activity can have targets – they are always shown in the same place.

3. The Topic

The question you asked is here. The more or less you add to the question, the more or less text is shown here. Keywords are shown here if the option to show is enabled.

4. The Text Area

• If the original document is linked from Word or Google Docs by the student, Scribo links the text from that document and brings it into vision here. The text is not editable as that needs to be done in Google or Word. A link is given back to the document.

• If the student's text is cut and pasted or even written into Scribo, the text is editable and any suggested changes can be accepted.

• Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation is enabled in text that is controlled by Scribo. In Word and Google the spelling and grammar is done by Word or Google.

• Scribo does not support images in the Scribo Text panel. Images in Word and Google Docs will be excluded.

The Scribo Text area is a 'Cold Writing' environment

Writing Check – All feedback is personalised on every writing check

Recap of Options

1. REMEMBER you turned on all of the Options and Contexts in Activity setup.

2. REMEMBER that you gave students access to all of these options on the left, not us. We do default to all unless we are told otherwise. OVERALL and PARAGRAPH feedback are always shown.

3. Revisions are available to everyone (more on this later).

4. Read Text is used frequently!

5. Report is excellent for students as well.

The Detailed Elements of Feedback – you will love them all!

Scriblet is an online writing buddy for students – and teachers!

Create a story context for students, support them and let them write!

Students choose their Avatar buddy. Whenever they like they can get some advice from their buddy. Checks are made across common grammar, punctuation and spelling errors as well as vocabulary, long sentences and word choices. It's a safe way for students to self-power reviewing their text and learning without constantly asking teachers.

Student Rubric Grading

Students can access the rubric assigned to the Activity and grade their work against it as part of a self-evaluation process.

Rubrics will appear for students when the option in Activity creation is set to 'Allow Students to Self Grade?'

Students can open the description and select a score from the element, from the rubric. Their score will be shown in yellow, teacher grades are shown in blue when teachers assign their view.

Rubrics record a growth continuum, not just a grade calculation

Scribo now supports multiple Rubric scores, opening up drafting to be a dynamic event able to be scored multiple times.

Example: 👨‍🦱 A student writes a text –

• 👨‍⚕️ Student self-grades against the Rubric

• 👩‍🎓 Teacher sees the levels chosen by the student

• 👩‍🎓 Teacher completes the Rubric (the intent is to say "if you hand this in now, you are at this level")

• 👩‍⚕️ Student does more work and re-rates their view

• 👩‍🎓 Teacher updates the Rubric with a revised view

• 👨‍⚕️ Students sees impact of changes

• 🎨 ... and so it goes.

• 👩‍🎓 Teachers see the history of Rubric grades on their side of Live Monitoring

In Live Monitoring, Teachers give Students live feedback.

• Feedback falls into two categories – Great Work or Needs Improvement

• Feedback is classified into one of 6 types (Cohesives, Sentences, Grammar Paragraphs, Vocab, Topic and Other)

• Feedback can be directed to a student or group (handy time-saver, no more duplication)

• Feedback can be set up as selected as a standard clause – one click, saves spelling errors

• Feedback is tagged to text positions.

Scaffolds can be used to differentiate learning and support

The level of support you give to students as they work can be adjusted by a scaffold. Scaffolds can give any level of advice and guidance to students and differentiated, at student level, when the Activity is assigned.

• Maybe you have ESL Students that need more support than others via extra videos and images, or some bi-lingual support.

• Maybe you have resources in Google and Web links that you can add for some students and not for others. You can copy and change Scaffolds.

• Maybe you want to set up a WEB Quest (a blast from the past!) that lets students follow a fully documented scaffold in Google Docs or Word. The Scaffolds panel comes up in the Google Docs Add-in and Word.

• Remember you can share Scaffolds across the school simply by clicking Share when the Scaffold is created.

• Scaffolds can be made public for you to share across all schools.

Key Benefits

• Scaffolds are dynamic, with checkboxes used to create lists to be ticked off.

• Teachers can see scaffold completion in Live Monitoring.

• Scaffolds can be used to direct students all around the web. Web links will open new browser windows.

Check writing at any time, as students write

Give students more responsibility for their writing to learn as much as they can, as they write. There is no value in GPS (Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling) corrections for a teacher, especially across multiple essays from multiple students, all the time.

Students profile their writing prompt – Scribo builds the context

The Activity context created by teachers is created by Scribo to guide students and personalise feedback.

Each student account has a 'Personal Writing Check' space that is not connected to class activities.

1. Select Writing Check as a student from the menu

2. Select the type of Writing Check – Quick or Advanced

A quick writing check will only ask for year and subject. Advanced Writing check asks for the question. Select Advanced Writing Check.

3. Profile the activity – build a writing context to check your text

Give the Activity a title. Enter the writing prompt for your text. Make sure it is the entire question. Scribo reads the question, searches for keywords and instruction words and builds the writing context used in the writing check.

4. Alter, change or accept the writing context Scribo extracts

Tailor the keywords, limiting words and select the right instruction words. Not all questions have verbs as instruction words. Our recommendation is to locate the question requirements and tag the correct instruction words. You can correct these any time and rerun your writing check. The Instruction words link to the style analysis Scribo presents in writing check reports.

5. Set up a Writing Plan

If you would like to build a writing plan for your text, select 'Set up a writing plan'.

Select the style of Writing Plan you are used to using or that your school follows. You can choose any type and add or change the number of paragraphs and headings.

6. Start Writing

Your writing plan accompanies your writing panel and context.

Students Plan – using your selected Essay/Writing Plan

• Teachers link a Plan to a Writing Activity.

• Students get the plan and any preloaded comments into their workspace. They can add information, drag keywords, brainstorm and move their ideas and research around. If the student is using Chrome, they can use the Record option to complete text entry.

• Teachers get to see the student plan and who has done one.

The Plan is visible to students as they write

Fullscreen or summary modes are easy to swap. Students who plan to write, usually write to plan and do a better job. Plan frameworks can only be changed by Teachers.

• Students can drag Keywords across the sections.

• Plans can be amended at any time by students.

PEER REVIEW IN SCRIBO

It’s a 2020 Christmas and our gift to you this year is Peer Review. We have been working most of the year with assessment and pedagogy experts at the NIE of Singapore, looking at how we can further support authentic assessment and assessment for learning around writing. Peer Review was part of the puzzle that we wanted to solve. It’s now done and ready to go!

AFL is a bit harder when you are dealing with multiple students and long format text but that’s the challenge we took on and conquered. Peer review plays a key part of AFL. I actually prefer to call Peer Review, Feedback in the Moment. This style of feedback is like a renewable energy in a classroom that amplifies stories across learners.

We also looked into the latest feedback research coming from Hattie and Clarke to make sure we were triangulated with current meta research on feedback. It's been a busy cycle of development but one we are very happy with. Our thanks also go to the literacy leaders and school improvement leaders in the Wollongong Diocese in NSW for their generous feedback on the journey.

Research is compelling.

What we discovered from the research is that feedback is one of the most powerful influences on student learning,improving student writing skills and building confidence. That statement comes with a classic however...

Hattie and Clarke ( Visible Learning - Feedback 2019) found that while feedback is the most powerful influencer on learning , it is also the most variable. These are their conclusions.

• About ⅓ of feedback doesn't work - it’s negative

• Feedback for one child does not work for another

• The feedback you give today - doesn't work for tomorrow

Catering for less variable feedback that potentially can be negative, tailoring feedback for each student and continually re-working the feedback each time a student needs more feedback are the three key components to Scribo that cover off the limitations Hattie and Clarke found.

Feedback needs to be in the writing moment, made available closer to the writing event. Feedback needs to avoid being negative and critical, change per student and change as needed in a continuum of feedback, kind of like a continual assessment against a rubric. This all sounds great but practically teachers don't have the time to do all this, all the time. Feedback at three levels is hard time consuming work. It’s time for AI to help teachers and students.

Hattie and Clarke say there are two important parts to feedback that need to be understood.

1. Feedback is the answer to 1 of 3 questions

   1. Where am I going

   2. How am I going

   3. Where should I go to next

‘Where I should go next’ is the critical piece of feedback that is most time consuming for a teacher. Thirty plus essays all needing personalised feedback is a massive time challenge and workload.

The most interesting finding is that If students don't get where to next feedback, they say they never got any feedback. I remember this happening in our house when my boys came home with lots of correction ink but very little connected advice that directed ‘where to next’ feedback about their writing. Hard work became a paper basket shot into the bin.

1. The second finding was that It's often not about the feedback you give, it’s about the feedback you hear and see.

How do students and teachers hear and see the feedback from what is happening in classrooms? These are the invaluable stories that need to be seen and heard.

The classroom is where in person teaching and learning happens, it's the colosseum of collaboration. Writing practice is supposed to amplify the learning and practice new skills. Often writing and feedback are very disconnected from the momentum of the classroom reducing the opportunity of immediate reinforcement and guidance.

Although teachers move around the classroom asking questions and giving feedback, when they are not explaining at the front, the last twenty years have been the subject of finding more efficient ways to ensure all students get feedback, from the teacher, and their peers while they are in the process of learning.

The very essence of formative assessment or feedback is the ability to react to the learning during the learning so it can be enhanced before it is too late. (Hattie and Clarke, 2020 , Visible Learning - Feedback)

With our new functional Peer review capability, teachers and students can see and listen to feedback in a 360 degree mode, learning every step of the way. Critically this happens seamlessly, live and without adding more work for anyone. Less friction, more stories, more learning! What is the downside of that ! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

Welcome to Peer Review or what I like to call - Feedback in the moment

1. Setup Peer Review

Peer Review is an option for all teachers to use, activated on demand through Live Monitoring options. Click Options , Click Peer Review.

2. Establish Student Pairings

By default, Scribo will Pair your students at random. Any odd numbers of students without a Pair will be shown. You can quickly assign a review partner.

Change Pairings manually at any time

Select One student and click Mutual Review to reverse the pairing or manually assign a Review partner.

On the top right , click Progress .

4. Remind Students with email

5. Students access Peer Review

The link in the email will take students directly to the Peer Review document.

If the options we set to Anonymous there will be no names seen by either Student. Only teachers know who reviewed work.

If Students have a Per Review to do, the Peer Review menu item will show.

6. Students Rubric Grade Peer texts

Students select Rubric Grade if they have been asked to score the Peer text against a rubric.

Simple click and select across the Rubric levels.

Once the rubric is scored across all levels, the Grade will be shown.

7. Peer Review Text Check and display

Click the Report option

The default display shows all commentary and comments from Students in pairs.

Search for specific students at any time.

If you want to delete a comment for being inappropriate, click the red X

If you would like to show comments on the white board or projector - click hide names.

8. Peer Review Rubric Summary of Student assessments

As students assess peers using Rubrics, Scribo records the scores and presents a summary of where the class sits. The numbers represent the number of students.

Click on the Rubric cell and see the students linked below.

Enjoy Peer review as much as we do.

Save time, reduce workloads, see better information

Cohort – Writing/Panel Reporting can be integrated into classroom collaboration in 2 ways

1. Upload Student Texts

Scribo lets teachers quickly load in texts received from students. This feature is used by many teachers every day.

From New Activity – Select

2. Select Panel Report from Live Monitoring

As texts are being written by students, they can be processed into a Work in Progress Writing/Panel report. This way, the Panel report can be run as many times as you like across the writing activity.

1. Go to Live Monitoring

2. Click the 3-dot command centre

3. There must be at least 2 students with text to compare. Do ensure that there are over say 150 words in each text so the analysis is worth you looking at.

4. Click Generate / Regenerate Writing Report.

5. Scribo will tell you when the texts have been fully analysed.

6. When the report is ready (usually in 2-3 minutes) you will get an onscreen message and an email.

7. Launch the Writing Report from the Activity in Progress list or the menu in Live Monitoring.

3. Launch Panel Report from In Progress

Review and Improve is where Scribo helps the most

Reviewing texts, giving feedback, tracking students at risk, coaching, mentoring and generally teaching across multiple students and classes is a huge job.

When it comes to helping teachers manage workloads, save time and improve student connections, Scribo does everything in one-click journeys through Live Monitoring.

Review and Improve integrates a range of communication features, functions and feedback loops to support pedagogy

Single Intent – Save time with better information

The Writing Panel Report creates insights and lesson plans for teachers, students and class collaboration – in minutes

Scribo builds a body of knowledge for teachers to share with students

Live Monitoring connects Teachers to Students for all Writing Activities

Live Monitoring is launched from In Progress

1. Each Activity per class is listed. Change Class to find specific activities.

2. All Options are available for each Activity in progress – see below for details.

3. Open an Activity by clicking Monitor.

Live Monitor Activity Options

The Live Monitoring Capability

Live Monitoring functionality is delivered in one control screen, in one click to get to where you need to be.

Live Monitoring – Student Text Review

Students are rated per core element

Each element rates students across the Cohort in order

1. Click on any element in the wheel. The Panel will refresh

2. Pick Cohesives

3. Pick Paragraphs

4. Student performance is rated with a key metric. Cohesives are rated Common to Advanced

5. Students needing the most help with Cohesives are rated top to bottom

Drill into each student's individual panel report

1. Hover on student name

2. Select tick for marking

3. Person icon for panel report

4. Pen to edit student text if there were errors in the text submitted

Click on the Student icon and go into Student mode

This puts you in the class – in anonymous mode – ready to talk to the screen

With student names hidden, teachers are ready to project the panel and collaborate with the class.

No names are shown until you click the student icon again.

The Writing Report delivers multiple outcomes – on demand

Hyperlinks are all over the Panel

Click to see live examples extracted from student texts – anonymous of course

All over the Panel Report, live context examples are shown. This is how Scribo cuts down on lesson preparation time.

Add a Group feedback comment with 1 click

One click on group comment and feedback goes to the whole cohort. As you review the Panel Report you can add a group comment about any issues you see.

Six Levels of Analysis + 1 (Overview)

Scribo uses a very generic 6 levels of analysis that easily maps to US 6+1 Writing Rubric (with the exception of Presentation). This level of analysis is not a particular rubric analysis. The levels that Scribo creates are relative to the Cohort and based on four quartiles of analysis. The whole idea of the Panel Target Board is to give teachers a heads up on where Scribo finds high, medium and low levels of core performance across the six core elements of writing.

These levels are generic and easily map to other well-accepted structures like the Common Core 6+1 Writing Rubric.

Analysis Overview

When a section is clicked on, Scribo takes teachers to that section of the report. There are four zones, coloured in Red, Orange, Yellow and Green. These are the 4 quartiles of student performance.

In one eyeshot, Scribo shows where teaching time could be focused. In this case and student cohort, Topic, Vocabulary and Sentences are the main issues needing teacher attention.

Analysis breakdowns to note – highlights of analysis 6 + 1 (Overview)

1. Overview contains target and general information that looks into a range of elements like

   1. Feedback – once feedback starts flowing from teachers

   2. Targets for writing – keywords, paragraphs, words

2. Topic

   1. Overall writing grade levels

   2. Prevalent keyword usage

   3. Identification of core topics written about

   4. Sentiment Analysis

3. Cohesives

   1. Full analysis of types, examples and usage

   2. Common, Advanced, Multi-word

   3. Cohesives Explorer

4. Paragraphs

   1. A breakdown by paragraphs across word and sentence counts

   2. Word Choices and variety per paragraph

   3. Sentence counts

   4. Extracted examples of good paragraphs and not so good paragraphs

5. Vocabulary

   1. Breakdown of word choices – word clouds

   2. Advanced, common, intermediate and academic word analysis

   3. Word clouds per type

   4. Least frequently used words

   5. Multi-syllable words

   6. Examples of all words in context of student usage

6. Sentences

   1. Breakdown across all sentence types and examples from student texts

   2. Long sentences with examples across all types

   3. Analysis of sentence length across all sentences

   4. Sentences with most syllable words, plus examples

7. Spelling and Grammar

   1. Syllable analysis of all words

   2. Common errors, examples and classifications of errors

   3. Commonly misspelt words

Z Scores show where skills and students are placed

Looking across a Cohort for where the biggest impact needs to be made, this shows a distribution of students above and below the mean of the cohort.

Student Reports – never consign your feedback to a paper ball in the bottom of a bag ever again!

Send Writing Reports to students

1. Make sure you are ready to release writing reports. If you are grading in Scribo, complete that first.

2. You can send reports to all or some students.

3. You can choose what you want to include in the report.

4. Scribo normally has the student email on file. You can overwrite the email address to send the report to a parent or other teachers if you wish.

5. Writing Reports are available to students from the student login.

Scribo delivers data to teachers that they have never seen before.

Measure and Reflect needs data

The pedagogical objectives behind Measure and Reflect

Data is available in five main places in Scribo

1. Panel Reporting

2. Live Monitoring

3. Feedback

4. Dashboard

5. Group Analytics

Feedback

Feedback is a great source of data – when you can catch it

The thing about feedback is that to measure it, you have to catch it – somewhere. Scribo makes this simple.

When feedback is entered in Scribo there are a few features that make the data richer if you use them.

1. Each piece of feedback is linked to Cohesion, Paragraph, Sentences, Grammar, Topic, Vocabulary or Other. These are along the top.

2. Text can be recorded using Chrome browsers – faster than typing and fewer errors.

3. Feedback can be made for the group or an individual.

4. Feedback gets classified as Well Done or Needs Work

5. Feedback tags are pre-linked to Categories, have pre-worded descriptors and can be managed, maintained, shared and personalised.

These elements improve the data quality captured by feedback.

Feedback statistics are live – in Live Monitoring

In the left column, Feedback is listed by category.

For each category, more detail can be shown with one click. Track feedback across the Group or Student category.

Feedback counts and trends

Click the pie chart on the top right of Live Monitoring. A dissection of feedback groups by Well Done, Needs Work and Overall tag if used.

Compare Activity Feedback with All Activities

Scribo keeps a count of all feedback counts, allowing you to see where feedback is trending up or down. Ideally, feedback should improve error rates and decline over time.

Class writing data across a series of Activities

This chart is best displayed after 2 writing activities have been completed or are in motion in Scribo.

1. Click on the Group icon in Live Monitoring

2. Trends of interest are listed

3. The top and worst performing skills are highlighted

4. By Student, the movement and growth are mapped. Red is a reversal of form, Green an improvement, >- indicates no change.

5. The metrics for Good and Bad vary. For example, an increase in Common Word usage is considered a Red increase (not the best), a reduction in Cohesives is a Green Reduction being a good movement.

When more than one school uses Scribo, you have complete vision across the data collected by every school.

1. See across all the access points to Scribo.

2. Look at major areas of improvement or movement.

3. Drill into each school one by one and see what is happening there.

4. Download data and do your own analysis.

Tracking Big Data across all classes and cohorts shows school-wide metrics

Overall data across capture areas, usage and types of access

Scribo records data from every writing check. This data is rolled and folded into the insights you see here. Click through any metric to see the results at different levels.

1. The default is Usage

2. Drop down to filter by Cohort

3. Filter by Subject

4. Filter by Student

5. Filter between a range of weeks and terms

6. Click Search to activate your query

Drill into each component for more detail

Points to note

1. The charts are clickable and will breakdown the Growth metrics on the right side.

2. The charts at the bottom can be filtered across attributes from the top.

3. Growth is factored into a timeline. Quick growth shows up, longer-term growth tends to be lower as the longer the time taken reduces the value of the growth calculated.

How to Get Scribo Going in Your School

1.Register your school with Literatu and request Scribo access

To use Scribo, schools must register with Literatu. Scribo is NOT a free service, however it can be trialled FREE for 21 days for up to 50 students in a school. Follow this link and register at the bottom of the page. We will make contact and get your trial community underway. We encourage the use of a single school for multiple teacher accounts.

2. Get teachers and students registered

Teachers and Students register using community / class access keys or via our Literatu school onboarding process. Scribo integrates directly with Edval, O365, Google, Google Classroom and One School to establish teacher, student access, classes and accounts. If you have any of these, please let us know. For the purposes of a trial, we issue a Teacher registration code. Teachers create classes and give students Class key codes to self register.

3. Students register via Single Sign On (SSO)

If you are a Microsoft or Google school, students can SSO (Single Sign On) in Scribo using their O365 or Google account.

With a school community, a teacher account and some student accounts registered to a class, you are ready to start exploring Scribo and how you can use the platform to help students to write better.

Scribo Workflow

Can educators monitor student writing tasks live?

Yes. Educators can monitor student work as they work in Scribo Web, O365 or in Google Docs. Educators work with a linked copy holding comments/feedback.

Can educators run a Cohort writing analysis any time?

Yes. Educators can run a cohort report that summarises the writing results and trends for the whole class or cohort at any time. This panel report is also available at student level.

Does Scribo build data efficacy models showing usage?

Yes. Scribo builds efficacy models that show where Students are accessing Scribo and the impact Scribo is making on improvement. Scribo aggregates many major metrics and can break them down in many different ways.

Do educators have access to student writing growth analytics?

Yes. Scribo builds data from the lowest level of identification. From Student → Educator → Course → Year → Subject → Faculty → School → Dept/District.

Key insights show educators the students and areas that are improving, and those which are not.

Is Scribo the most comprehensive writing support platform available?

No surprise there. Yes. Scribo has been designed to achieve three main outcomes and in so doing, be relevant to three clear sets of stakeholders in a comprehensive way.

1. Engage students with full-time writing support that does more than writing correction. Analysis and feedback makes the biggest difference via real connections to student writing growth. Universities must provide reasonable support to enable students to achieve expected learning outcomes.

2. Educators have live student connections to student progress, feedback, learning analytics and supporting workflows all reducing workloads and time demands.

3. Schools and Faculty leaders have a strong base for improvement through live data analytics collated across multiple levels. This is the backbone of writing improvement and data for benchmarking and targeted teaching.

The Many Ways Teachers Leverage Scribo

Excel is a great metaphor to describe what's possible with Scribo. Just as you use Excel to quickly enter, load and add numbers, you can also use the Excel platform to model and calculate the capital position of a bank. Excel gets the work done with you at any level of your proficiency in less time and with more accuracy than a blue pen and a calculator.

Scribo also takes a platform approach to helping you improve writing. As with Excel, Scribo teachers can explore the base features and grow their experience across deeper levels of analysis as they need deeper levels of information. Every step you take with Scribo leverages new insights, new student interactions and more tailored use cases for your class and students.

Scribo is not designed to be a wall of software to climb from the outset. Scribo lets you step into options and functionality at your pace. Here are 10 ways to use Scribo in your class.

10 Ways to Use Scribo in Your School

1. Load student texts for instant analysis

2. Student access to writing checks for web and for Google Docs

3. Integrate class writing Activities with student writing checks

4. Instant cohort reporting

5. Cold writing with cohort analysis

6. Create Activities with live monitoring and Teacher Cohort report

7. Seamless integration with Google Classroom

8. Awesome feedback features – Rubric Marking, your way

9. Interactive writing and accessibility features

10. Plan improvement from integrated data insights

Teachers spend a lot of time figuring out where the class, and each student, needs targeted instruction. Teachers often talk about the lists of feedback they manually build to discuss with the class and individual students. It is critical information that takes even more time, alongside the time needed to review each student text. When there are 30+ texts to review per class, the time and effort to get this done, as rewarding as it is, adds up. Teachers are always left with the question, “Did I catch it all?” After 30,000 words, we are only human after all.

Reading EVERY word is what Scribo does, faster and more consistently than anyone. Powerful AI and machine learning finds exactly what teachers look for and goes on to build a full cohort report, ready for class discussion and discovery.

“WHERE can I engage ALL students with feedback? WHO in particular do I need to focus on? WHAT is the key point or points I want to focus on with the class?”

Scribo does this for teachers in seconds, putting them into teaching mode before they even read a word. The core inputs to the process are the thousands of words students create across a range of subjects every week. The core outcome is the amount of time Scribo saves teachers.

OUTCOME

The ultimate outcome for every teacher using technology is simply to get what they need with nothing more to do. Unlike many systems where teachers enter data only to have it reformatted back at them, Scribo does something very special. Scribo consumes student text and creates high value insights for teachers to review. Scribo Connect is our Artificial Intelligence learning engine that imports and analyses all genres of student texts. Before teachers even start reviewing student drafts and submissions, Scribo has read every word and rated each student.

Integrated with O365 and Google, Scribo requires no additional work from teachers to start the analysis.

Scribo Connect:

• builds comprehensive analyses from all student texts

• blends data and discoveries into live insights for the class and individual students

• suggests where to improve student writing across six insight categories

• allows teachers to grade, compare, summarise and deliver direct fast feedback online

• creates a range of writing analytics, built from a full analysis of student text submissions

• auto sends feedback reports to students

• tracks growth and opportunities for improvement across levels of writing

• rolls up data from student, class, subject and year levels for consolidated discussions, teaching and resource planning

Scribo quickly becomes a key assistant, helping to reduce grading time, optimise feedback and track improvement across student writing skills. Scribo Connect can be run as a standalone resource for teachers by following Feature 1 in this document.

The cohort report builds a complete analysis and insights into the writing skills and levels for the cohort and each student. The report analyses six key metrics, critical to all levels of writing, and discovers teachable moments where teachers can add the most value to a class or student.

Scribo creates over 80 points of analysis for teachers to find the teachable moment across the six core elements. The huge benefit comes from the consistency of the analysis and the depth of the insights into each core element. You can't teach good writing in a day, but you can focus on one thing at a time with great supporting examples that have your back.

When cast to a whiteboard or projector, everyone is on the same analysis page.

Starting an Activity Context to achieve an outcome

The CORE Writing Elements Scribo covers

Student Writing Checks – bring elements together

One of Scribo's core features is giving students the ability to check their writing for a range of writing errors and issues as they are writing. Why wait for the writing errors to become a teacher's problem? Busy marking work accounts for almost 70% of teacher interactions with students.

Instruct, Develop and Organise

Scribo Student Writing Check – OPTIONS

1. This is an Essay. Students need to include an introduction with a thesis statement. Obviously, not all essays are equal. If this is not something you want students to have feedback on, or you have not yet got their heads around thesis statements, don't select this.

2. Students can self-check their writing. In the Elements table above, the fundamental writing components that Scribo monitors are listed. These are all available for students to see and use unless you want them to focus on 1 or 2 items in line with what you are trying to achieve.

If you dont de-select, your students will see them.

Fun Facts about options

1. You don't get stuck with options you cannot change – you can always go back into the Activity and change options to suit you, even if the Activity has been assigned to students. If you want to get students working without support, close down Student Check. When you are ready, open it back up! You can alter options as you like to support your approach.

2. If you change a Scaffold or add one midstream, Save will reset the options.

3. If you change Writing Plans, Scribo will wipe the existing Plans and create a new container that will update students. They will lose their plan if it has been completed.

OUTCOME

Scribo allows teachers to profile the writing activity and define key prompts and targets for students to follow. When teachers define the parameters of a writing activity, the analysis of Scribo gets better. Keywords and topic analysis, together with target information, school year, level and writing style definitions, all help Scribo to do a better job with automatic feedback and cohort based analysis. PROCESS

Teachers define the Activity / Target that students are writing to.

Create New Activity from the Scribo menu.

Activity definition sets up parameters that drive the way Scribo delivers feedback and analysis.

1. Targets – paragraph and word limits

2. Topic keywords and special synonyms if any

3. Level of writing

4. Type of writing

5. Subject / Year level

6. Special word lists

7. Writing style attributes

These are defined when an Activity is created.

Additional information such as a multimedia writing scaffold can also be created and aligned to guide student writing. Marking rubrics and student access options set up the workflow of how students will interact with the writing activity in Scribo.

An Activity is established in under one minute.

From Activity creation, workflow options can be set, such as :

1. Class assignment. Student and class assignment is simple and integrated with Google Classroom if that is being used.

2. Students can be granted access to check their work. If teachers are using Scribo for a summative Activity, the Check Work option can be disabled.

3. Students can be granted access to Scriblet, our Scribo writing assistant.

LIVE MONITOR WRITING PROGRESS

As students create texts in either Web or Google Classroom / Docs, Scribo allows teachers to live-monitor progress. This feature syncs student writing from Google Docs and any writing entered via Scribo for web.

OUTCOME

This is the quickest and easiest way to see what Scribo analysis is all about. Gather some past texts that teachers have graded and reviewed or some new texts that are ready for review and feedback. These digital texts can be linked into Scribo for immediate analysis.

INPUT

Gather written digital texts from a recent essay or current writing task. Texts would ideally be of more than 150 words, and written to the same topic.

The texts can be in Word.doc format, loaded from Google Drive or in PDF format.

PROCESS

1. Log into Scribo with a teacher account

2. Select Scribo and your Class

3. Add an Activity

4. Select - ‘I will upload Texts’

5. Complete Activity profile

6. Drag and drop digital files

7. Scribo will inform you when the Panel report is complete. The Panel report gives teachers a complete analysis across all students and texts analysed. This report becomes an important in-class teaching resource.

Welcome to Scribo 2.0, the world's leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform that is helping teachers help students to write better.

Scribo implements clever combinations of AI and Machine Learning (ML) to save teachers the vast amounts of time they currently spend reviewing and grading student texts.

Our purpose is simple

We want teachers to have more time with each student, helping to improve writing skills by spending less review hours discovering where they need targeted help.

To improve writing, students need to be encouraged to write more. It's easy to figure out that encouraging students to write more means more teacher review and feedback time. More time doesn’t magically appear without adding or changing a step in the current review, drafting and grading process.

Scribo is every teacher’s feedback and grading assistant, giving them insights into where students need support and targeted instruction before they even read a word. Scribo is suitable across every year level, subject and writing context.

Plan for Stronger Connections and Fewer Corrections

Grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS) checkers have been with us for years. Even as they get smarter every year, they still miss opportunities to improve writing. Based on our research, GPS assistants have not and do not advance writing skills. They do correct, most times automatically as words hit the screen, over and over again.

When GPS assistants are removed, spelling, punctuation and grammar errors return to historic highs. Surely this is a contributing reason for poor results from diagnostic writing tests where GPS’s are turned off.

Text correction capabilities will never be the ‘thing’ that improves student writing skills. Correction tools don't help students transform word choices and cohesion into more varied sentence usage and paragraphs that build topic momentum, just as an example. These are foundation writing skills that need identification, instruction and practice.

Teachers agree that to improve writing, students need to practice more. More practice means more feedback and with that comes more time needed for targeted instruction. For teachers, the determiner ‘more’ relates solely to multiple units of extra time they need to find to keep up. When you multiply the number of English and humanities teachers by ‘more’, you get what is called ‘much more’. Most teachers tell us that 20 hours a week overtime is normal. Across faculties, that adds up to thousands of hours a year just to keep up.

If ‘more’ is continually invested into writing corrections, teachers will never have enough time. Teachers need better connections to where student writing skills need more help, before they even read a word.

Time for New Connections

It’s time for new connections to be made between students, writing improvement and teachers. Technology support for writing can open live connections into writing feedback and review for teachers and students. Imagine students being advised of keyword repetition, overuse of simple cohesion, run on sentences and more, as they are writing and before they hand work in. Imagine teachers having visibility of this with an ability to quickly target live feedback before students hand work in.

With personalised and consistent feedback delivered into a live writing workspace, students take more ownership of their writing. Without ownership, many students remain happy handing in work that then becomes their teacher’s problem to fix. The next tragedy is when students proceed to miss or lose the feedback that gets painstakingly crafted by teachers (still often in red pen). Once that feedback is handed back to students, it’s gone. Time for something different?

Welcome to Scribo 2.0

Scribo supports writing improvement by opening a functional connection between student writing, teacher review and the all important improvement / feedback loop. By giving students instant feedback on their writing, Scribo saves teachers hundreds of review and feedback hours. Teachers often say that the time students most need writing support is in the late hours, the night before work is due. Whenever students are writing, Scribo is beside them as their personal writing assistant and coach doing more than correcting spelling.

English and humanities teachers face challenging workloads from classes with several learning levels of student writing skills. To help each student, teachers ideally need to personalise student feedback and target teaching across the levels in the class. Scribo helps teachers identify where help is needed by reviewing every word from every student, building live insights into where help is needed. Scribo even prepares the context and examples for the review and feedback lesson.

Scribo quickly builds a stronger connection between teachers and students. Between them is the feedback loop that is the key driver of student improvement. To continually review and give effective feedback across dozens of student texts, teachers need more time and support.

Our purpose is to replace hours of teacher invested review time with a tireless automated assistant. Scribo easily and quickly copes with large text volumes, reads every word, finds traits and examples and reports insights back to teachers consistently as a complete body of analysis.

Scribo 2.0 is a fluent writing platform connecting teachers and students to improve core writing skills. The teacher and student connection is leveraged in several ways to suit the technology comfort level of teachers, the ability level of the students and the target the teachers are trying to reach.

Scribo is not designed to change or inflict a pedagogical approach on teachers. Many teachers use Scribo in many ways to support the pedagogical and activity planning they have in place. Many teachers rely on Scribo to create teachable moments they can cherry-pick and talk about in the context of their lesson plan. Teachers also let Scribo create lesson plans via the live panel view of the class. Scribo and in-class panel displays combine beautifully in a classroom environment. Scribo creates many views into writing that teachers have never seen before. Who can remember a pattern of fractured sentences across 40,000 words? Scribo can.

As one very experienced English teacher told us, “ You can teach many things in a day but not writing. Good writing takes time, continual practice and feedback, across many years of consistent teaching from all teachers.” Writing is the biggest challenge facing most K–12 education systems around the world. Scribo is here to help.

OUTCOME

Students love having direct access to Scribo writing checks. Giving students guidance as they write increases the level of ownership of their work and helps them implement feedback strategies and suggestions in a learning context, as they write. Retrospective corrections can be easily lost, overlooked or forgotten.

Scribo works alongside any digital text from Google Drive or Word. Scribo is also available inside the Google Docs framework as a Google Add-on, live inside Google Docs as students write. Scribo Student SOLO checks can be used for any text for any subject and level.

Please remember that SOLO checks do not have topic keyword links defined, and as such do not measure topic accuracy. When linked to a teacher driven activity, more detailed checks on topic and keyword usage can be completed.

PROCESS

Scribo for web is accessed as a student via www.literatu.com. The student should have a valid Literatu account or have been given a student key to register with Literatu.

1. Select Writing Check from the Scribo menu

2. Students cut and paste text, drag/drop a Word or PDF file, or select a document from Google Drive. As Scribo does not have details of the question, Scribo will exclude keyword and topic analysis. Writing checks will reset feedback on demand.

Checking your Topic and Keyword accuracy

Checking text is very straightforward. What if you had a big question to answer and you really wanted to see if you were on track?

From Writing Check on the Menu, open an Advanced Writing check.

Enter your question and Scribo works out the Keywords and styles of writing for you. If you tune this manually by adding words, the writing check gets smarter and more informative. Make sure you check out Writing Styles.

Case 2.1 – Student Access to SOLO Writing Checks in Google Docs

OUTCOME

Scribo SOLO works as an Add-on from within Google Docs. Students can check their writing as they can in Scribo SOLO for the Web.

The school Google Domain Administrator should install the Literatu Scribo app into the Google Domain, opening immediate access to all Students. Students will then have access to Scribo as an Add-on inside Google docs without the need to install Scribo for Google Docs.

Scribo can be installed from Google Marketplace via this link. https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/search/Literatu%20Scribo

PROCESS

Students create text in Google docs, open the Scribo Add-on and click Check.

Case 2.2 – Students Check Writing Styles

OUTCOME

Most essay / text topics have a verb or verbs that set the style of writing required. Be it a ‘compare and contrast’, ‘discuss’, or ‘give advantages and disadvantages’ type of question, Scribo tracks and highlights the style changes or rhetorical moves students make in language to make their point, discuss advantages and disadvantages etc.

Scribo has 19 style types that students and teachers can check in one click. They are all available in Style Checking. Look for Style Checking in the Writing Check menu.

PROCESS

Go into Writing Check and then to ‘St’ or Style Check. You can choose multiple sections of analysis and see where in your document you have answered the requirements of the question.

This feature is available for both teachers and students.

Extended Word Lists that match base subjects like Chemistry for example, can be loaded into Scribo and applied at any level of analysis. This opens up checking at a new level of analysis across multiple subjects that demand the use of particular topic and technical words.

Check for Writing Styles

The following writing styles are checked. Scribo can quickly be taught new words and combinations of phrases.

Account for, Analyse, Compare, Contrast, Criticise, Define, Describe, Discuss, Evaluate, Explain, Illustrate, Interpret, List, Outline, Prove, Recount, Relate, Review, State, Summarise, To what extent, Trace, Rhetorical Question, Inference, Background, Notation or Quote, 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, Place.

The way you can mix and match features and use cases in Scribo is very flexible. There are core features of Scribo that combine into a complete process, or stay flexible and lightweight in a just-in-time scenario.

Working in a Class Activity scenario where students engage with a writing activity (for practice or assessment), work on the text, receive teachers’ live feedback and then do a peer discussion and review by way of a Cohort analysis report, is made simple to manage by Scribo.

OUTCOME

Using Google Docs or Scribo Student web, students start and complete a Writing Activity. The purpose of creating a writing activity in Scribo is to engage students with a question to answer and to link their work directly to the live teacher feedback and analysis process. The process is engaging, avoiding the rush of review work for teachers to read on final submission.

PROCESS

Step 1 – Create an Activity for the Class

Follow Case 3 above and create an Activity for completion.

Step 2 – Assign it to the Class via Scribo

Students have access to the Activity via Google Classroom or Scribo and start working.

Students create their texts and interact with Scribo Activities in Google Docs or Scribo Web.

Step 3 – Live Monitor – Give Feedback

Teachers are connected with live student writing, monitoring progress and able to give feedback.

Step 4 – Run a Cohort Report

On demand, as part of an in progress or completion review, teachers can create a Cohort Report on demand. It’s ready in minutes to discuss with the class.

Available Term 3, 2020

Feedback is critical when learning to write. With multiple levels of learning in a class, it is really difficult for teachers to keep up with the volume and variance of feedback required.

Once students develop a habit, it can be hard to break. GPS ( Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling) assistants help out emerging writers possibly a bit too much. There is a midpoint in Scribo between Cold Writing and GPS assisted writing and we call it Scriblet.

The whole process of writing improvement starts with getting students to practice more. The more practice the more feedback required from teachers. The younger the writer, the more encouragement needed. It starts to become a Catch-22 unless there is a circuit breaker. Scriblet is designed to run alongside emerging writers and help to correct basic errors of writing, as they happen – sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.

OUTCOME

The intent of Scriblet is to keep students writing, with simple and effective feedback delivered to the writer and their teacher without any human intervention. Accessibility features in Scribo now voice read the feedback back to students in any native language they choose. The whole Scriblet process is open and can be used as a semi-cold writing assessment or a simple place for students to practice. Either way, teachers have a complete breakdown of where more feedback and instruction is needed.

The immersive reader handles text read-back with syllable emphasis, word cards and multilingual translations.

Making sure students understand the feedback being given is critical. This feedback can be replayed in over 20 foreign languages if required.

When we sit down to digitally write nowadays, it is usually in Google Docs or O365. If not, it usually ends up there so students (and adults) can share the text, print it and email it. It makes perfect sense therefore for Scribo to reside in Google Docs (soon to be O365) to help them as they write. Why move text around when you can work in one place?

SCRIBO INTEGRATION INTO GOOGLE DOCS AND CLASSROOM

So many teachers use Google Classroom and so many students use Google Docs. We integrated Scribo into the ecosystem to make it easier to access, and a logical extension to what happens in Google Docs.

Scribo is an Add-on for Google Docs, able to be installed at a School level so that each student gets access via Google Docs under the Add-ons menu. Once the student has a Scribo account linked, the Add-on is ready to go.The full features of Scribo Writing Check are alive inside Google Docs. No need to leave your document.

Teachers also have a Scribo Add-on that gives them full control over Scribo from within Google Docs. Linking Scribo to Google Classroom, creating Activities, Live.

Monitoring and instant Writing Checks are all a single click in the Scribo Google Add-on.

OUTCOME

Students and teachers use Scribo in a familiar Google context, with no need to remember web addresses and alternative sites to access. As Scribo is all about writing, it makes perfect sense to find Scribo in Google Docs.

Teachers have a live sync option to Google Classroom, able to sync their students into linked Scribo classes. If the class already uses Google Classroom, one click will sync Scribo to Classroom. This means that any Activities created in Scribo become Activities in Google Classroom. No classroom workflows change and students who are used to working in the Classroom framework will continue to do so.

With Google integration, we leave a couple of things alone rather than interrupt workflows. Grading and final marks are awarded in Google Classroom and Scribo Grammar checking does not conflict with or overtype Google grammar checking.

Teachers can quickly manage everything about a Writing Activity from the Scribo Google Add-on Panel, including reviewing a document they have created themselves, unlinked to any class.

Students enjoy using Scribo in Google Docs. All formatting is preserved, and images and footnotes are excluded from checking as well.

Take away the GPS (Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling) support and the wheels fall off writing. Many teachers agree.

The GPS analogy is like Google Maps and the other GPS acronyms. Nowadays people drive around not knowing the name of the road they are on. Take away Google and everyone is lost and no-one knows how to get from A to B.

It’s like writing without GPS support. Cold writing is a blank screen, just like a blank piece of paper handed out in Diagnostic Testing. Write something, and apply your best GPS without any support. Often this style of testing discovers the extent of the GPS core issues as well as word choices, cohesion, sentence structure and paragraphing.

OUTCOME

Scribo lets teachers run a Cold Writing activity in class, removing all GPS and surrounding assistance from the writing space. When everyone is complete, the Cohort Analysis is run to give a complete view into where to start working with students.

If teachers wanted to give a writing prompt or scaffold for the question, no problem. The level of student interaction is defined by teachers. Of course, in this scenario, students are not allowed to do a writing check.

Cold Writing with a scaffold to get students writing is one idea!

As students create their responses, teachers can Live Monitor the text. Why wait for all texts to be handed in before planning lessons ahead? Live feedback and writing checks can be run at any time.

Any time teachers want to see a cohort report, they simply ask for one. All that is needed is at least two student responses and Scribo does the rest.

We love this quote from one of our favourite teachers –

“If you’ve been in teaching for the last four or five years and you don’t know that feedback has a significant effect on learning, then you’ve had your head under a rock.” Kelly Bauer, St Lukes Assistant Principal

Yes, teacher feedback makes the biggest impact on improving student writing skills. We all know that it also takes the most time.

We worked hard on improving feedback processes for teachers with teachers. We rethought and reworked :

1. The way teachers wanted to make effective and consistent feedback through a standardised library of comments they could activate quickly.

2. How teachers can apply a single point of feedback to a student or apply the feedback to the entire class.

3. How teachers can dictate feedback to avoid typos and use Voice to Text quickly.

4. The way feedback is saved and reported on rather than dissipated through multiple documents.

5. For ESL and language teachers, streamline the way multilingual feedback can be delivered to suit the context.

All feedback is tracked and able to be analysed by Cohort, Class, Activity and Student.

Rubric Making is all about you.

OUTCOME

Teachers can use their existing rubrics as marking guides for grading. All rubrics can be shared across teachers to minimise the number of rubric conflicts and repetition that can happen across different years and faculties.

Teachers can integrate rubric marking into Scribo to round out the whole feedback / grading process. Students can grade themselves against the rubric as they submit or turn in work for grading.

Teachers can quickly create and grade against rubrics online.

Our AI and ML engines build and check a lot of data. We analyse and interpret data every second to deliver feedback, advice and suggestions. The more data Scribo collects, the more Scribo learns about writing, levels and the definition of what good writing is. All data is analysed in your context, which is so important. More on this later.

As Scribo runs its checks across text, we record a lot of headline data. This means we look at movements between writing versions, looking for improvements, changes in error rates and many more indicators that show whether writing is improving and growing, or not.

Introduction

Steve Graham and Karen Harris (2016) begin the article “A Path To Better Writing” with an excellent description to set our context:

"Imagine you are charged with the task of solving a poorly defined problem. The general purpose of the problem is understood, but the solution can take an infinite number of forms, and the criteria for judging the success of any solution is fuzzy. While you may have seen how others solved this or a similar problem, the processes for creating these solutions were mostly hidden and involved the use and orchestration of a variety of different mechanisms, including physical, mental, and emotional apparatuses. To make this problem even more challenging, the solution must be understood by others who are missing vital information, which may or may not unfold as the solution is examined. Sounds like an almost impossible task, doesn’t it? This daunting problem is an apt description for writing."

For decades it’s been fairly well understood what approaches can facilitate growth in students from novice to expert writers. Essentially, students need to write often (Graham, Kiuhara, et al., 2012) and for a purpose (Graham, Harris, & Santangelo, 2015); teachers need to provide task-related feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007); class activities should target specific skill building with use of examples (Graham, Bruch et al., 2016); and all of this should take place in a positive environment focused on creating and celebrating quality writing (Niemiec & Ryan 2009). Is such a breakdown helpful in its clarity and its research-based evidence? Or overwhelming as you consider the time and effort required of both students and teachers in already very busy classrooms?

We believe in an evidence-based approach, but also recognise that technology has advanced during these decades and can assist both teachers and students to use these approaches in ways that are empowering and motivating. What follows is a brief overview of how Literatu’s Scribo can support busy teachers to help students improve their writing.

Scribo assists in three main ways:

1. saves time

2. supports targeted teaching

3. captures data for feedback and measuring growth

None of these come as new tasks added to the teachers’ workload, but are achieved in ways that streamline and build on teachers’ current practices.

Write More and More Often and for a Purpose

(Graham, Kiuhara, et al., 2012) (Graham, Harris, & Santangelo, 2015)

One of the biggest impediments to improving student writing is the time required. Part of the reason for this is that each writing task leads to more tasks. For example, it’s not just the time students spend writing, but the stimulus and pre-writing, the planning, group practice and sometimes research or critical reading. Then after the fact, tasks might include peer read-arounds, teacher feedback, and targeted teaching to address common issues. Each of these are important and helpful, but when capturing student writing is made easier, along with student and cohort analysis of each text at the word, sentence and paragraph levels, this allows teachers and students to focus on segments of the writing process.

With Scribo making each step easier and analysis more granular, more frequent writing is possible. Here are three scenarios supported by the research:

QuickWrites

When the workload implications of a writing task are diminished, quick writings gain increased value. Rather than a warm-up that might easily be discarded, with ease of analysis and capture of the skills data embedded in the writings, this regular occurrence contributes to evidence-based activities and targeted teaching. For example, after a class discussion or watching a short video clip, students could process their ideas in a short writing that can be used during the same lesson to review learning, find misconceptions or build on successful skills. Among the many things teachers can do is to use sample paragraphs for group analysis or focus on common topics or summaries.

Guided Practice in Context

As the opening quotation illustrates, developing writing skills is a metacognitive task. Classroom teachers already recognise skill gaps and next steps in their students’ journey as writers. Isolating key aspects to focus on can be challenging amidst the shuffle of papers and myriad needs in a classroom. When teachers are provided with a quick report highlighting strengths and weaknesses in topics, vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraphing, use of cohesion and spelling and grammar errors, they can choose the most beneficial to student growth and use the anonymised examples chosen by Scribo as the heart of a guided practice session. Rather than decontextualized worksheets or activities, the lessons can target the actual words, sentences and paragraphs used by the students in the class. In this way, both the issues and more effective approaches are suited to the students’ ability levels in the class because they are drawn from the students in the class.

Reflections

Reflecting is a very challenging cognitive exercise. Good reflection digs into the details as well as ponders the bigger ideas and broader connections. Many classroom strategies employ reflection to help students develop their understanding of new knowledge and insights. Direct and targeted improvement in students’ abilities to reflect can be achieved by highlighting examples and aspects of effective reflection. Use the concept development approach of using examples and non-examples to develop deeper learning without extra preparation.

Streamline and Super-charge Teacher Feedback

The work of John Hattie has had a profound impact on the benefits to student learning when teachers provide task-related feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Teachers use a range of methods to give students feedback on their writing from hand-written comments on papers to oral or typed comments on digital documents. One aspect virtually all current approaches share is the loss of this incredibly valuable information! Given the time invested in giving the feedback, its loss is unacceptable in the digital era. Besides the automatically generated data drawn from every text submitted to Scribo, teachers’ comments are quickly captured using “talk-to-text'' recording and can be aligned to specific aspects of writing (e.g., 'vocabulary', 'paragraphing', etc.). Furthermore, teachers can use the same approach to assign their comments to either individual students or the whole class when common issues are discovered. Of course this streamlines what can be a laborious process, but best of all, each comment is kept for later analysis by both teachers and students. The impact of saved and tracked feedback that is linked to instructional practices limits the “moving target” aspect of teaching writing where the comments related to one task or student disappear and the challenge of building writing skills begins anew with each text. With a data-informed context, teachers gain quick insights into what’s working, how students are progressing and can share successful strategies with colleagues to help systemic improvement.

Engage in Easy Targeted Teaching Activities

Empowering teachers to teach as effectively as possible is an obvious goal. But to make it more likely, the main obstacle – lack of time – must be removed. Reference has been made in this document to the analytics and insights Scribo provides for an entire class set of texts in a matter of minutes. Here is an animation that illustrates the Report Panel.

You can also view the animation as a playable video.

A detailed overview of the many ways a creative teacher could use the insights and examples from the panel is beyond the scope of this article, but a general sense of what it provides can be gained with a quick analogy. When teachers begin to give feedback to student texts, very early in this process something happens – they notice things that they realise could be “teachable moments” the next day in class. So this practice of noting common mistakes, areas for subtle improvement in techniques or real student passages to use as exemplars or non-examples is exactly what the Report Panel provides – all without teachers reading a single text.

Imagine how this can lead to both saved time and improved student writing. When teachers use the Report Panel as part of a formative process, students can engage in targeted revision, then re-submit their work. Teachers can choose to do this once or over a series of iterations. One significant result of this approach is the culture shift away from “student turns in, teacher grades and gives back” to one focused on a collective focus on quality writing and student ownership for ultimately handing in their best work. With this culture of a collaborative shared focus on quality writing, teachers will be reading students’ best work and thus no longer get the sneaking suspicion that they have worked harder giving students feedback than the students did in writing the text.

With Scribo making targeted teaching easier, improvements in the quality of student writing can be expected. Here are three scenarios supported by the research:

Explicitly Teaching the Writing Process

The first recommendation of the US National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance and its 'What Works' guide for effective teaching of writing for primary students is providing daily time to write. Their second recommendation is “Teach students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes” (Graham, Bollinger, et al., 2012). Similarly, the group’s report for secondary students recommends using a “Model–Practice–Reflect instructional cycle” based firmly on strategies related to the writing process (Graham, Bruch, et al., 2016). Writing teachers are familiar with the process approach that includes planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising and editing. When assigning and gathering data from student texts is easier through using Scribo, teachers have time to more explicitly address aspects of the writing process.

Scaffolding Learning of Genres / Text Types

Many subjects in the curriculum focus on specific text types. Of course, English leads the way with genres like persuasive, narrative and informative writing, but other disciplines such as history, science and the arts have their own formats for interpretations, analyses, reports and reflections. When student work is quickly made available for structural analysis through Scribo, even “non-writing teachers” can use the tool to help students learn the attributes of things like effective openings, clear thesis statements and structuring body paragraphs. In this way teachers only have to know what they want students to produce in terms of format, and focus on that rather than feel they need to address all aspects of students’ writing.

Use of Cohesives

Evidence surfaced by Scribo echoes what writing teachers recognise – better student writing tends to use more and more sophisticated cohesive words for conjunctions, connectives and transitions. But unlike many text analysis software packages, Scribo does not assign a grade so students have no incentive to “game” the software by randomly loading their work with advanced vocabulary or “high value'' cohesive words or phrases. Doing so simply makes students’ work silly and hard to read. Empowering students to get feedback on the cohesives they do use, showing them other words they might use and even providing in-context examples of more advanced cohesion used by peers on the same writing task support John Hattie’s outline for the helpful feedback that tells students "how am I going”, and “where to next” (Hattie & Timperley 2007).

Enhance your Classroom’s Motivating Environment

The research on Self-Determination Theory (Niemiec & Ryan 2009) provides evidence and models to promote students’ intrinsic motivation which results in improved outcomes. As has already been mentioned, a positive learning environment focused on collaboratively developing quality writing is one key approach to successful writing instruction. The research in SDT provides a model that identifies three factors that increase intrinsic motivation: student choice, positive relatedness and competence. When students get quick, frequent and objective feedback on their writing and teachers use targeted activities to build skills, students develop a sense of themselves as increasingly competent writers. This builds a positive loop where the increased motivation yields better outcomes, leading to increased motivation. Compare this to what is common in some classrooms, where students submit a paper and get a poor grade, then move onto another assignment, forever left with de-motivating feelings of incompetence.

References

Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2012). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide (NCEE 2012- 4058). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx#pubsearch.

Graham, S., Bruch, J., Fitzgerald, J., Friedrich, L., Furgeson, J., Greene, K., Kim, J., Lyskawa, J., Olson, C.B., & Smither Wulsin, C. (2016). Teaching secondary students to write effectively (NCEE 2017-4002). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from the NCEE website: http://whatworks.ed.gov.

Graham, S., & Harris, K. (2016). A Path to Better Writing: Evidence-Based Practices in the Classroom. Reading Teacher, 69(4), 359-365, accessed 3 January 2019, <https://www.uen.org/core/languagearts/writing-collection/downloads/PathBetterWriting.pdf>

Graham, S., Kiuhara, S., McKeown, D., & Harris, K.R. (2012). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in the elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 879–896.

Hattie, J.A.C., & Timperley, H (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.

Good writing is a product comprising much more than good grammar, punctuation and spelling. In fact, most times as we write (mainly type), the GPS engines fix most of the mistakes we make. Good writing is more than GPS corrections.

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The mission of each sentence is to make the reader want to read the next one”. This is at the core of what Scribo is all about. We want every student to be the best writer they can be, to be articulate and interesting with text. Our clear intention via Scribo is to provide a functional assistant for teachers and students to advance writing skills. With insights into where help and mentoring is needed, and instant feedback coming from Scribo, students and teachers both have access to what they need.

Classroom processes to help improve writing need more support. The forever-full bag of words that teachers carry is often busy work to complete after hours. This should not be the end point of being an English or humanities teacher, but rather the beginning of being able to help each student with targeted instruction without having to read a word.

Many teachers say there are two key turning points to improving writing skills across cohorts. The first is to get students freely practising writing, taking more ownership in their work quality. The second is teachers working dramatically less hours reviewing and grading student texts and more on targeted instruction.

If the question is “ How do we improve student writing levels?”, we believe there are two good answers. Firstly, we need to do more for students than offer them simple and multi-varied GPS assistance. Feedback needs to be about the writing not just GPS. Secondly, we need to use smarter technology to increase student ownership in writing, dramatically reduce teacher review and grading hours, build instant teacher and student insights and give students good feedback as they write.

Teachers who do the same thing over and over again hoping writing improvement will simply just grow, really have their head under a rock. By adding a dash of what is possible with a little bit of clever technology support, they will be helping themselves, students and the future of the next generation of writers.