Back in 2001, when I started as a teacher, the technology boom was in its nascent stage. I remember toting a large bag filled with papers home most nights and going to sleep drowning under a vast sea of student homework that needed grading. My classroom was even worse, cluttered with books, manipulatives, globes, maps, and learning stations that left little room for anything else. However, as I write this in 2018, things have changed dramatically. Today’s teachers have edtech in their corners.
When I was a teacher, helping students to become competent writers was a chore, though not an impossible task. Grading the written assignments of students was also a difficult task, as many of them butchered the English language and treated grammar as though it was a skill that could be disregarded. To further complicate things, if students needed help editing a paper or project at home, they were on their own.
Now, all of that has changed, well, sort of. Students have access to a host of grammar apps and tools that will not only help them correct their grammatical errors, but also teach them to be better writers in the process. If I were still in the classroom today, I’d use these grammar and writing apps, tools, and resources:
Grammar Pop– If you’re looking for a fun word game for adults or you want your kids to learn parts of speech as quickly as possible, the Grammar Pop is for you. With this fun game, you match words with parts of speech of pop clouds and advance from nouns and verbs to gerunds and participles.
Mingoville– With 10 missions, you can use Mingoville to learn English language. The app has a dictionary that is available in 32 languages and contains over 10,000 audio clips to help you learn to pronounce all types of words. There are also 130 games and activities that will reinforce spelling, reading, grammar, and pronunciation. If you love to sing, there are also 10 songs that you can sing along; you can also participate with your friends.
Quill– Quill is a writing tutorial app for teachers designed to help students become better writers. Quill is a nonprofit organization, and its goal is to provide tools such as Quill to help make students better writers. Quill uses web applications to create engaging content for students that helps them learn grammar, writing skills, and vocabulary. Using the teacher dashboard, you can monitor students’ progress according to the Common Core Standards; this feature also makes grading more intuitive and meaningful.
Turnitin for Educators: This website has a wide array of functions designed to help teachers check the integrity of their students’ work, and it helps them mark students’ work. It helps to prevent plagiarism by comparing the works submitted by students with a vast text comparison database, OriginalityCheck. The GradeMark function helps teachers give feedback and remarks to their students, and QuickMark enables them to mark students’ work directly.
Word Sort by Grammaropolis: This tool uses Grammaropolis characters to help teach the parts of speech. Children play by taking a word as it floats across the sky and dragging it into a container that holds the appropriate part of speech. It also has pages explaining parts of speech along with their grammatical function and game character personality.
Writing Challenge App: This app aims to guide students who want to do some form of writing but need some creativity nudging. The app delivers a prompt every minute, suggesting new ideas, characters, scenes, and even plots.
Grammarly– This platform helps the student to improve their grammar and build confidence in their writing ability.
Did we miss any?
