Friday, October 5, 2012

NoRedInk - Reponse

Wow!!! What an impressive resource to improve the writing of students! Noredink addresses numerous issues related to effectively building students' skills and takes a drastic step in changing the entire format of learning in an English classroom. 

As a teacher, I have struggled spending hours and hours correcting all of the small grammatical mistakes that seriously hinder students in making clear and comprehensible arguments. Unfortunately, this time is almost always in vain as the vast majority of students' future work is littered with the same mistakes time and time again. To ignore the faults in students' work is a disservice, but what should a teacher do if the standard approach of correcting all errors is entirely ineffective? 

Noredink lets children practice grammatical problems and works to identify their weaknesses so that the teacher can address these points of confusion in addition to giving them a chance to practice. Corrections from a teacher written on an essay are not interactive. Students, if they even spend time looking at the teacher's suggestions, are often frustrated and unable to interpret what it is they have done wrong. Noredink on the other hand gives clear instruction and offers other opportunities to correct similar questions. This tailors the work to the students' needs and relieves the teacher to focus on higher level issues such as formation of concepts or how to write a well structured argument. 

Essays from students can also be utilized in a similar fashion where the mistakes the students make can be input into a format that allows for simple correction from the student so that they can recognize and interact with the corrections being asked for by the teacher. When the teacher reviews the essay a second time, the problem areas are already highlighted so that an entire re-read of the essay is unnecessary. 

I really feel this could be productive for every class. Too many students fail at making comprehendible essays and the current standard for correction is obviously not working effectively for a huge number of students. I hope something like this is adopted at the lower grade levels so that I am not faced with the challenge of teaching elementary grammar when I want to focus on content and structure. 

1 comment:

  1. Hi, Jack - welcome back to Blog World! Your last sentence really hit me: how do we automate lower-level tasks to free up your expertise fo r the more important ones? Great thought.

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