Using Writelike in the classroom

Try one or both of our onboarding lessons 

Writelike onboarding lessons

This page will give you a quick overview, but for a more hands-on experience we suggest you check out one or both of our onboarding lessons:

Note: These lessons work better if you are logged in and have the lessons assigned to you. How to Writelike will be automatically assigned to you if you create an account, and Teaching with Writelike will be automatically assigned if you create a group.

If you just want a quick one-page skim, read on.

Writelike activity types

Scaffolded rewrite

The core learning mechanic of Writelike is the scaffolded rewrite, in which we:

  1. Provide a snippet of authentic text
  2. Highlight useful patterns
  3. Show worked examples using the same patterns applied to different content
  4. Get students to write their own versions

This activity works on students' sentence- and paragraph-level writing skills, developing fluency and craft.

Most Writelike lessons are a series of scaffolded rewrites. Sometimes these rewrites build upon each other to help students create a longer piece of text (see Lesson types below).

Expansion blocks 

Expansion blocks let you collapse and expand highlighted text in a snippet, so you can explore the impact of elaborations in the text.

Memory drills 

Retype the text from a snippet within 2 minutes and using up to 10 peeks. These drills are quick way to practise keyboarding skills.

Proofing drills 

Correct the scrambled words and punctuation in a snippet within 2 minutes. Great for practising spelling and punctuation.

Sorting activities 

Sort the sentences from a long snippet into the correct order. This activity is useful for discussing structure and cohesion in a snippet.

Lesson types

A lesson is a group of activities organised around a central idea, genre, or even a single snippet of text. Broadly, we have three lesson types.

Introductions

Introductions collect snippets from a variety of texts to introduce students to topics such as characters in narrative, the expressive function of semicolons, or nominalisation in history and social science writing.

Detailed practice

Detailed practice lessons focus on one snippet and model the creation of a longer piece of text, such as writing an exciting getaway scene, ramping up the intensity in a high-concept narrative, or capturing the collective character and individual details of a crowd. These lessons tend to be challenging, but can result in high quality writing.

Remix

Remix lessons simply provide a set of snippets and stimulus images with prompts on how to recombine them. Examples include the Mixed Remix series of lessons, or the Snippet-a-day series on fictional narrative or memoir. These lessons are relatively light and fun, and are good for regular practice or a class warm-up activity.

Writelike feedback tools

The type of writing students do in Writelike is complex and open ended, so feedback needs to be given by their teachers and peers. Our feedback tools support teachers to monitor student work and provide targeted support to students who might be struggling. We also have options for eliciting peer feedback that range from fun and casual to more structured and analytical.

Moderator view

Teachers can see how their students are progressing in the group moderator view. You can check where students are up to in the dashboard and read their responses to see if they are grasping the key techniques of the lesson and identify where more in-class support is needed.

Checkpoint pieces

Checkpoint pieces are Writelike's version of a summative assessment, pulling together all the concepts in a lesson. Feedback on checkpoint pieces is also the most structured way to provide feedback in Writelike, with a loose grading system and a place to enter commentary.

If checkpoint peer review is enabled, students are shown anonymised checkpoint pieces from others in the group and are asked to assess how well those responses fit the pattern, as well as provide commentary.

Response feeds

Writing is a social activity. The response feeds included in the lessons offer a way for students to casually react to and comment on each other's work as they progress. While not as rigorous as the feedback for checkpoint pieces, this kind of social feedback can be highly motivating.

Wrotevote

Need a peer feedback tool that's a bit more formalised than the response feed, but more fun than the checkpoint peer review module? Give Wrotevote a go!

In Wrotevote, students are presented with random anonymous responses from 2 of their peers, then vote on which they like best, with the opportunity to react and comment on the one they liked. Students then get to see which of their responses performed best and whether they placed in the top 10/25/50%, as well as the overall top responses from the group.

Wrotevote emphasises positive reinforcement, giving students the benefits of competition while minimising the potential harms.

What does Writelike look like in a classroom?

One of the benefits of Writelike is that it's not just a generic "homework add-on". The content is rich, and can be folded into your unit plans and lessons. We aim to save you time in planning and lesson material creation so that you can spend it in discussion and feedback activities with your students.

Our lessons include instructions that support self-directed and teacher-led learning. If you plan to use Writelike as primarily self-directed, we still suggest dedicating a couple of hours of in class time to introduce the tool and how you want your students to use it. Keep learning social by using Wrotevote or peer review, and host in class discussions for students to share their work and check understanding.

The Teaching with Writelike lesson goes into more detail, with practical tips on topics like how to introduce your class to the tool, or how to select an appropriate lesson, as well as more philosophical ideas around where Writelike fits in literacy education and the theories that support it.