Review: Quill Writer

Writing is meant to be a social process, we write to communicate. This is something I firmly believe and incorporated into my classroom often.

Today I will look at a website I found over at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation site: Quill Writer, a cooperative writing game, that allows students to work in partners to create a piece of writing given a starter, and target vocabulary words. It's still in beta, but there is a lot of potential here. I tried to incorporate a lot of technology into my classroom because we live in a digital world that is ever evolving, and I noticed great variety in tech savviness with my students. Some could work a smart phone but when asked to save a document, looked at me like I was speaking Greek. 

The real beauty of this tool is the ability to create your own activities, which means activities using your vocabulary, your definitions, and on the skill level of your students.

I thought about a non-fiction piece I used with my advanced ELLs. It was about the Alamo, because I love anything I can do cross-curricular. In different years I did different skills with the article, fact and opinion, sequencing, main idea, summarizing, even persuasive writing. 

I settle on a main skill of summarizing and sequencing, and a supporting language goal of using sequence signal words, i.e. transitional phrases, in their summary to organize the information.

The whole process of creating the activity is super easy and I love the amount of customization. At the end of creating the activity it asks for a target number of words for students to use in the writing, I chose 10, and when the activity created it says 6, the default, so I was a bit disappointed with that, but it is nothing I couldn't tell my students. Anyways you end up with something like this:

My lovely colleague and I practiced with a default story to test features. I really liked being able to mouse over words and get a definition. I also liked that it tracked my usage of the words in any form, and bolded them in the story. ELLs can really struggle with suffixes and changing word forms, so this is excellent practice. 

I also loved another feature that asks students to review the other student's sentence.

This one activity hits so many different standards! I am not about using technology to say that I used technology, but this is an activity with some real value. Could it be done without this website? Sure, the same thing could be done on pencil and paper if you lack technology, or on a single computer, or in Google docs. But, the ease of use and quality of activity make it definitely worth mentioning.