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Writable
Pros: Shows students the power of process. Helps students give and use peer feedback.
Cons: Everything is customizable, so expect a lot of prep up front to get things just right.
Bottom Line: This is an intelligently structured tool for teaching writing and review that focuses on process as much as product.
Teachers can use Writable as the foundation for their school writing program. To get started, have students join with a class code, or import and sync your classes with Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, or HMH. Co-teachers can also join the class with an invitation. The intuitively organized Explore tab is a great place to begin. Teachers can quickly click through the Featured sections for contemporary cross-curricular short articles, videos, and prompts for a specific lesson or check out the Short Response section for argumentative, informational, and narrative prompts. Take note as well of the SEL-focused prompts based on the CASEL framework, covering narrative writing for Self-Awareness, Responsible Decision-Making, and Relationship Skills. These prompts could serve as great class openers. When you find a suitable prompt, copy it to your assignments, modify the prompt, supports, and rubrics as needed, and then assign out. New AI-powered tools can help teachers brainstorm ideas, or get started with assessment.
As students practice writing in response to prompts and participate in peer review cycles, teachers can manage the class through the dashboard and provide feedback to students throughout their writing journey. The dashboard shows info on individual students as well as the class, drilling down through categories, skills, standards, and even checklists and rubrics. Students who need extra help and practice are flagged for teachers. Teachers can also work together as grade- and content-level teams to align assessments using examples for different writing levels.
Teachers will also want to check out the accessibility features and make sure students are aware of their options. Students can toggle on audio instructions for each writing prompt, and teachers can enable additional scaffolds such as starter sentences or paragraphs and prefilled graphic organizers for specific students. Students can also respond to prompts with video or audio recordings or images. Spanish-speaking students who are learning English can toggle the navigation menu between English and Spanish.
Writable is an extensive web-based writing program. It focuses on a recursive writing process with a lot of peer and teacher feedback. Content covers all major writing genres taught in grades 3 to 12 including argumentative/persuasive, narrative, and informational/expository. As they complete assignments, students learn how to respond to prompts in quick writes, short responses, multi-paragraph essays, and extended writing projects with multiple revisions. Schools that use six traits, writing workshop, and other instructional methods will find that the program works with any of those methods in multiple content areas.
Teachers manage the peer feedback and revision process and can jump in to provide additional feedback and assistance. In the anonymous peer review process, students use the rubric to assist with evaluating the writing, assign stars, and provide written feedback. Writers receive and incorporate the feedback, and then the writing goes back to the reviewers for another look. In addition, teachers can assign evaluations of the peer feedback.
In addition to peer feedback, Writable recently rolled out an updated suite of AI-powered tools. Teachers can use those tools to get ideas for writing prompts, suggestions for feedback and comments, assisted scoring, and check student writing for authenticity. There’s a suite of originality checker tools to see in detail how students are interacting with the tool, which teachers can show students ahead of time so that they know what will be tracked. The platform also allows for suggested scoring and detailed feedback which the teacher should tailor.
When you create an AI prompt for students, you can also add specific skill tracking you’d like the tool to pay attention to. Some of the tracking focuses on whether or not the student is summarizing and identifying the main idea, synthesizing and making connections, analyzing literary text structures and much more. Teachers can also assign prompts to themselves to see what it looks like from the perspective of a student.
There are also some additions to support virtual and hybrid learning, including recording and embedding video, providing video and audio feedback, printable reading passages, and differentiated prompts for any assignment as well as more grading control over multi-section assignments.
Schools that use Chromebooks and Google Classroom can import their rosters into Writable and set it up to sync with Classroom assignments. Students can write and submit from Google Docs and save the writing to their drive. If schools use the Canvas or Schoology learning management systems (LMS), teachers install the Writable app and then create assignments. The process is slightly different for each, so make sure to verify the steps for your LMS. Students will see their assignments when they log in.
Writable's biggest strength is in its scaffolding of each step of the writing, revision, and feedback process, and how it supports the assessment of both writing and feedback. It helps students by organizing the process and helps teachers monitor the students as writers, revisers, and reviewers. This focus on students as reviewers -- not just writers and revisers -- is particularly notable. While drafting and revising one's work is an important part of the writing process, research supports that peer review is an equally important skill. Writable supports this focus with its Practice Peer Review assignments, and in the way that giving feedback is integrated and assessed alongside drafting and revision. It's a unique approach among competitors in the edtech writing space and is laudable.
Writable also gets other things right, like making sure there are accessibility features and detailed graphic organizers that support all students, including ELLs and those who struggle with focus and executive function. In addition, the reports that teachers get provide valuable information that'll shape instructional decisions, and the "team grading" feature -- which provides groups of teachers the ability to norm grading and identify examples -- also shows a keen understanding of how tech can support teachers. Although this leads to the big caveat with Writable: There's a lot to it, and learning how to use all of Writable's features requires a significant time investment. But since it's a tool that teachers can rely on to anchor their curriculum, that initial investment over, say, a summer, will be worth it. Every element of the program is useful and thoughtfully designed to support effective writing.
Learning Rating
Teaching an old dog new tricks!
The program is very expensive and it is daunting when you first look at it. We had purchased it before the Covid shutdown and did not receive much training. I shied away at first, but I was really drawn to the interface and spent some major time teaching myself. It's best to use a premade assignment first to learn how it works. But making custom-built assignments is easy once you give it a try. The AI feedback was a surprise this year, and so welcome. I think that feedback has cut my work in half. I read all of this feedback and I am pleased with how well it fits the assignment and rubric and it even sounds like me. When you have questions and open a chat, a Writable associate answers promptly and helps me get the answers I need. I hate to think about going back to a plain Google doc for writing assignments. Writable is my go-to!
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