Scriveners' Trappings

AI Text Classifier is a new tool from Open AI, the makers of ChatGPT, that will detect whether or not a passage of text has been written with ChatGPT and similar AI writing tools. To use AI Text Classifier you do need to have registered for a free account on Open AI. Once you have an account you can use AI Text Classifier. To use AI Text Classifier you simply have to paste a block of writing (at least 1,000 characters, roughly 175 words) into the text field and click the submit button. AI Text Classifier will then rank the writing as very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely written by AI. For the record, AI Text Classifier classified my article about detecting writing created by AI as very unlikely to have been written by AI. 

Via John Evans, Jim Lerman

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa) , Dennis Swender

Free resource of educational web tools, 21st century skills, tips and tutorials on how teachers and students integrate technology into education

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa) , Jim Lerman

“Polish your grammar, rate your readability, train yourself to write every day, and more.”

Via John Evans, Dennis Swender

Jacqui Murray shares how we can encourage an improvement in writing using technology. These creative ways will help you think about how to help children, particularly those who struggle with handwriting and typing. Screencastify is the screencasting tool I recommend for Google Chrome and Chromebooks. Built for Chromebooks, it saves all of your recordings directly […]

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa) , Kenia Yarelis

Discover WriQ, a Google Docs add-on that automatically marks the basics in student writing so that ELA teachers can concentrate on more difficult concepts.

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa) , Kenia Yarelis

"Editor's Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just five years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the second in our series. Read the first one here.

 

“I want to say something important about writing,” Pirette McKamey told 25 seniors in her English class at San Francisco’s Mission High School one fall afternoon in 2012. It’s incredibly hard, and always incomplete, she explained. “I’ve reread some of my essays 20 times and I still go, ‘I can’t believe I made this mistake or that mistake.’”

“I’m going to read a powerful essay as a model today,” said McKamey, who frequently shares her students’ work at the beginning of class as a way to showcase examples of effective and creative approaches to writing. She appreciated the student’s paper for “the heft of its content,” she told the class. “It also feels real. It was written with real engagement and honesty.”

Via John Evans

The best writing apps for iPad, like any concept of ‘best,’ is subjective and further based on need and circumstance.

Are you a poet drafting when inspiration strikes? A student taking notes and writing essays? A novelist that usually uses a desktop, but needs their new iPad Pro to do work on the go?

While the idea of writing more than a few hundred words on an iPad may seem crazy, using the iPad as a powerful portable writing tool allows you to take advantage of inspiration whenever and wherever it strikes. And with iPad screens now approaching 13″ and capable of supporting USB connections to enable standalone keyboards, it’s easier and more comfortable than ever to draft a masterpiece while away from your desk with the help of an app, an iPad, and a good idea.

Via John Evans

Author and professor Adam Grant said, “Good communicators make themselves look smart. Great communicators make their audiences feel smart."

Via Laura Largo

I can't keep quiet about author/storyteller/educator Kevin Cordi's brainchild, the Top Secret YA Storybox Project. This past Sunday whil

Via Sarah McElrath

@sarahintampa

Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa) , Jim Lerman

I’ve spent much of the summer working with teachers who are eager to integrate making and writing but uncertain where to begin.

This is what I tell them: 

I tell them that making must elevate writing, otherwise it will merely replace it. And writing matters.

I tell them that we need frameworks that help us see how making and writing can connect inside of our classrooms and workshops. Making writing looks like play, but it’s purposeful. Intentional.

I tell them that we need tools and strategies and protocols that inspire complex, creative, and high quality work.

I tell them that for all of these reasons, planning matters.

Planning really matters. So, this is where my return to blogging will begin.

Via John Evans

Via Joslyn , Dennis Swender

Most graduate writers who are struggling with their writing are actually struggling with their thinking. It isn’t a psychological block, but rather the intellectual confusions endemic to the process of communicating sophisticated research. To Rachael Cayley, these confusions are real and can have deleterious consequences for writing, but when we treat these problems as conceptual problems in our thinking we create the space to use writing as a strategy to solve them. The writer’s block label may just be further alienating us from our own writing; write your way out.

Via Elizabeth E Charles, Dennis Swender, Jim Lerman

Write better with Draft. Easy version control and collaboration to improve your writing.

Via John Dalziel, Kenia Yarelis

Editor's Note: In the next five years, most of America’s most experienced teachers will retire. The Baby Boomers are leaving behind a nation of novice educators. In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just five years leading a classroom. The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project is crisscrossing the country to talk to veteran educators. This story is the second in our series. Read the first one here.

“I want to say something important about writing,” Pirette McKamey told 25 seniors in her English class at San Francisco’s Mission High School one fall afternoon in 2012. It’s incredibly hard, and always incomplete, she explained. “I’ve reread some of my essays 20 times and I still go, ‘I can’t believe I made this mistake or that mistake.’”

Via John Evans

There are so many tools that will help students with the writing process. Some of these tools help organize research while others help students organize their thoughts or locate grammatical errors. 

Via Elizabeth E Charles, Sarah McElrath

Coding and computer science have yet to make their way into every school curriculum in the U.S. But the country isn’t short on initiatives—such as Google’s Code Next program or the White House’s Obama era Computer Science For All campaign—which aim to change that.

And while these programs attempt to arm students will the ability to code, they sometimes overlook a critical skill that developers, computer science scholars and tech recruiters say is key to landing a job in their field: writing.

Via John Evans, Jim Lerman