Writing Assistant

Some learners will require one minute to grasp new material while some will be shaky after an hour.  Having rich material available will help all learners.  

Studying rich material at their own pace and long as is helpful will enable learners to come to class prepared and provide more time for practice, production, and feedback.

A simple example of this is students writing.  They write on a given topic say "my favorite animal"  200 words ... but they make many choices as they write.

Having open assignments like this makes it much more costly to mark.  One reason for the popularity of multiple choice.   

This system will lower the cost of marking more open assignments.

One strategy for helping talented bored students is to facilitate them acting as Teacher's Assistants (TAs).  An example is to enable them to markup some peer's work with teacher monitoring.

Stronger students and weaker students learn more.  

TAs might be celebrated or effectively secret, TAs provide feedback online and perhaps discretely in person, depending on the school culture.

The system can add value by giving select students markup access to a few other student's class work.

Many students do not care.  A lot of time is spent wondering (mostly complaining about) why and trying to induce caring.  This is rarely effective with poor students but always starves good students.

One strategy is Tit for Tat: focus on students who demonstrate interest and reward them with attention, guidance, and feedback.

An example is providing feedback on written work.  Spending a lot of time to provide quality feedback which is not even read is a waste of time and worse deprives an eager student.

teacher should be able to provide rich feedback i.e.

circle an error "missing article, see page 17 of the English handout"

sometimes rewrite a whole sentence, keep the original for comparison, and provide references 

There should be a way to ensure a minimal level of quality before a student can submit for grading:

1. at least one hundred words
2. no more than five errors as found by WA 
3. use these five words <list>

A kind of pre-grading or quality assurance.  This would certainly conserve the teacher's and perhaps student's time.

Goals

1. provide timely quality feedback
2. evaluate student's writing
3. present and encourage best practices
4. minimize teacher's time required to provide quality feedback

learner's can use the integrated LanguageTool to help them detect problems

a teacher will be able to create/modify/activate grammar rules: