Part 1: It was the best of times….
This semester, I made a commitment to do more with my chosen Writing Assistance Tool (WAT), Writable. Typically, I lesson and unit plan about two weeks to a month at a time, knowing things will have to get moved and be fluid. I never give myself too much grief about having to take more time here or there or switch mini-lessons around. However, since March of 2020, I feel like planning anything for longer than a week (sometimes even a few days) is impossible.
Since returning from winter break, we have been Face to Face teaching for about 5 weeks. It's been a lot of flip-flopping back and forth between our hybrid/face-to-face schedule and being fully virtual. Which, let me tell you, benefits no one and stresses everyone out. It's hard to do anything with consistency. I’ve struggled with switching back and forth between the teaching modes and how to do things because I can’t get traction in anything.
But I will say this, Writable has been a godsend in this process for a few reasons.
This is what I hope will be the first of a two-part blog about my deeper experiences with Writable this semester. Besides my title being a clever and cheesy Dicken’s allusion, I bet you can guess that I’m going to focus on the positives of this work in this post. In the next blog, I will focus on what I’m going to call the ‘challenges’ and not the negatives or cons. But before I talk about the positives, indulge me for a moment while I recap what I’ve done so far with WAT, Writeable, and this project so far. The craziness of the year has forced me to step away from writing a lot more than I’ve wanted to.
WAT was the start: A Sparknoted Recap
When I started this project back in July/August of 2020, my first-hand familiarity with WAT was limited to Turn-it-in.com, Grammarly, Google Docs’ predictive test, and old-school spell check on Microsoft Word. I had a passing knowledge of NoRedInk and Quill. But that was it.
Since the start of this Ahead of the Code project I have:
- Used NoRedInk to try to get feedback on my own writing. I was not encouraged by this one (see first blog).
- Used Writeable to get feedback on my own writing. I was much more encouraged by Writeable. This is also explored in the blog entry linked above.
- Used Hemmingway to do some revision of my own writing just for fun and to experiment with another WAT less formally.
- Done a pre-assessment writing in Writeable to get both my students and myself familiar with it and what it can do. This was my attempt to kill two birds with one stone at the beginning of the year. The kids were hesitant, and there were some technology shortcomings we all had to overcome. See this blog post.
- Used Writeable to do a round of self- and peer-reviews on a big reacher essay my students wrote in the fall. This was fantastic and made me excited to do more with it. See this blog post.
WAT I’ve been doing this semester
As I discussed above, semester two has been a bit complicated. If this were middle school, I probably would have broken up with teaching this year at least a dozen times. But, I’ve forged on like every other teacher this year, because I need to teach kids and I love it, despite its insanity. The SAT is upon us. In Michigan, my Juniors actually take it early next week as I write this entry. And though some of you may have heard the College Board has done away with the SAT essay, but that isn’t true for Michigan’s state test. At least for this year, there will be an essay. I’m hoping it's the last year I have to teach this unit, but that's another topic for another day.
With all the flip-flopping and for my full-time virtual students, I immediately saw the benefit of using Writable for this unit. The College Board’s released prompts were right there and easy to use. The complex rubric was already uploaded and in the system, and I didn’t have to do a lot with it. They were already placed into clear ‘I can’ statements for students to use to self-evaluate and peer-evaluate each other.
When I did my Stunt Journalism research essay in the fall with students I had to create the whole rubric through Writeable and that was a bit time-consuming. This time was much easier since there was a rubric already distilled into its most important evaluation categories and learning statements. My students were also much more familiar with Writable, so there weren’t the tech issues there have been with past assignments. There was a lot to like about the WAT with this unit.
Writable Positives
The part that you’ve all been waiting for (and maybe even skimmed down to). What did I think and what did I learn?
- Writable makes assigning essays really easy for the teacher. Though as I stated above, it was a bit complicated to put in my own rubric, it wasn’t difficult. It just took a bit of time and some experimenting. Though this year, that felt like a lot of time to invest, in a ‘normal year’ it wouldn't have been that bad. And once you’ve invested that time, the rubric is there for as long as you have your account, so it's easy to use the rubric again and again. You can also share that rubric with people in your district. So if you have common rubrics, you can do the work over summer with a colleague over a cup of coffee and be done.
- Writable’s AI feedback feature and writing assistance does help some students. Though it is focused on counting words in lines and seeing how long your paragraphs are (I will talk more about that in the next blog), it does help some students. It also has editing assistance that will offer predictive words for students while they are writing (especially if you are using a Google Doc to write in). These features are helpful because my high school students often do their virtual work at 2 am. I do not subscribe to their vampire schedules and am not awake to answer their questions, so this is in-the-moment assistance.
- Feedback is very easy to give as a teacher and as a student on Writable. In one of my previous blog posts, I discussed the peer editing process on Writable and how its anonymity is incredibly beneficial for students. I also really liked the sentence starters that Writable gives students to help formulate their thoughts in a kind and constructive way. Those same sentence starters and others are available for the teacher. Though I hate canned feedback, it is helpful because I really start to see if I use the same phrasing a lot because it comes up at the top of my suggestions. It also helps when I am struggling with how I want to word feedback to a student. We’ve all be there in those grading marathons or fogs where what we want to say to a student just doesn’t come as easily on the 50th essay as it did on 12th essay.
- Writable’s connection and syncing with Google Classroom is amazing. Though it does have some flaws (I will talk about that in the next blog post). It allows everything to be streamlined and kept right in one place and links the students directly to the prompt in Writable so they don’t have to go 10 places to find their work. This also makes the grading part of essay writing easy since the scores transfer right over from the rubric on Writable.
- The amount of data Writable has is mind-boggling. I haven’t begun to scratch the surface, of it because I quickly become overwhelmed by data. But you are able to track your most struggling writers to your most successful and see their growth over time on standards and types of writing. This means teachers have access to a lot of reports quickly for students. This might be helpful considering a lot of us are following the ‘less is more’ scenario this year (and probably next year too because I’m a realist and COVID isn’t going to be done next year) and if your admin wants a report on student writing, you should be able to have luck with these features.
- Writable can be used at any point in the writing process and highly versatile. You could do just a thesis statement, and introduction, the whole essay, or part of one to use the AI features and peer editing features. It just takes a little bit of pre-planning to create the assignment for students.
- Though I did not use this feature (at this point), Writable also gives you some assessment freedom. They have audio and video features for students now in their interface, which allows students and teachers to have a choice in how they answer prompts. Since one of my goals is to have students be experienced in multiple writing media types, this is intriguing to me.
From Good to Bad
There is lots to like about Writable and other WATs, but the more I used these technologies the more questions I had. And with questions came answers and still more answers and concerns. There are real limits to WATs and there is some concerning information about what these algorithms are being applied to do. These are some of the things I will be talking about in my next blog.
