![]() ![]() We had conversations about why a period was a more appropriate punctuation mark than a comma in a given sentence and discussions about how to correctly introduce a quote that was also a sentence in itself. It was a great chance for me to circulate and help students one-on-one understand sentence structure better. When they ran the checks for these and saw their papers light up with highlighting, they finally tuned in to these errors and went to work fixing them. It was powerful! We’ve talked about sentence fragments and run-ons, but they have continued to turn in papers with these errors. My freshmen, however, used the Writing Reviser add-on in their Google document for a paper they were finishing last week. I just discovered these tools from SAS Curriculum Pathways, so my students have not used the Navigator yet. The add-on does the job of the revision piece of the Navigator, but all from a side panel within a Google Document. They can compose and save within the platform, and they can get advice in the revision process on issues such as essay structure, sentence structure, wordiness, redundancy, and much more. ![]() ![]() Students can brainstorm ideas and then use drag and drop to order them into an outline. The SAS Navigator is a nice scaffolding piece for students who may need writing broken down into smaller chunks. The SAS Writing Reviser is an add-on that allows one piece of the Navigator – the Reviser – to be used in a side window within a Google document. The SAS Navigator is a free Chrome App that walks students through the writing process from brainstorming to publishing. ![]() SAS Writing Navigator (App) or SAS Writing Reviser (Add-On) (And by the way, I used it to proofread this blog post!) In the course of last year, I found that this helped them to make better diction choices and to improve the flow of their writing. The text to speech tool allows students to choose from a variety of computer-generated voices and listen to their own papers. I often plead with students to read their writing aloud to themselves because they will catch errors, but some of my students feel self-conscious about doing that. Read&Write offers tools to accommodate learners at all stages, but in the ELA classroom, my favorite way to use this tool is in the self-editing stage of writing. For an overview, watch this video on using Read&Write in Google Drive. This allows students to have just about any document or website read to them by the computer. The tool that we used most often (in part because it is in the free package) was the text-to-speech tool. Read&Write assists students in a variety of ways, including speech input, text to speech reading, picture dictionaries, word predictions, and more. Teachers can sign up for premium features free students start with a 30-day trial some features disappear after the trial, but many remain. Read&Write for Google is a Chrome Extension that is used within a Google document. As such, every effort is made to keep websites current and in compliance with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.Four Tools that Help Writers be Better Writers ***Duplin County Schools is dedicated to facilitating effective communication. Use of student work requires written permission from the student author, which must be obtained by the faculty member before the item can be used. **US Copyright Law provides for copyright protection for any work by an author or an artist, including student authors and artists. The school district reserves the right to remove or restrict any links. The school district provides links as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement of the site by the school district. The school district is not responsible for the contents of any linked site, any link contained in a linked site, or any changes or updates to such sites. *The school district retains control over what links will be placed on district-related websites however, the linked sites themselves are not under the control of the school district, its agents or its employees. ![]()
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