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teachwire.net/secondary PA R T N E R C O N T E N T 17 Tech to take care of the marking, plus a Fitbit for students’ writing – WriQ is many things. Martin McKay explains more... The Inside Story Texthelp has worked in education technology for over 25 years, supporting students across all areas of the curriculum and across different year bands. This time has been spent developing technology that can help students improve their literacy and numeracy skills, as well as being a support during exam time. To do that, we’ve worked with university researchers to gauge how well our solutions are working, and sought to collect data we can use to show improvements in children’s writing. You can measure writing in lots of ways – the number of words typed, sentence length, maturity of vocabulary used, frequency of errors. All are metrics that can be used for assessment purposes, yet we often hear how teachers spend considerable time on marking tasks which essentially amount to ‘busywork’.We’ve taken the technology we’ve developed and used it to make a tool called WriQ, which aims to make writing assessment faster and easier. Writing assessment is inherently inconsistent and subjective.We wanted to ensure WriQ could assess those metrics with absolute consistency, but we were also aware of teachers needing to use their own rubrics to suit the needs of their subjects and curriculums. This has become a key feature in the commercial product. During WriQ’s initial testing, however, we made it so that teachers could only assess students using the same rubric, so that we could establish a set of national writing norms.What makes WriQ unique is that the product has been in the field for almost two years, recording all those metrics. This lets teachers see not just how well students are performing compared to their classroom peers, but how they’re doing in comparison to the rest of a MAT, their regional area or even the nation as a whole. For students,WriQ is a motivational tool that makes writing seem like less of a chore. Just as a Fitbit and similar devices give people numbers as they move – be it their steps or running distance – the onscreenWriQ widget that students see makes writing fun and puts students in charge of their own learning. They can receive immediate feedback on their writing as they type, and work towards improving the number displayed on their ‘WriQMeter’. Finally,WriQ is also a powerful benchmarking tool. If you’re implementing a multi-year writing improvement plan,WriQ can benchmark a Y1 cohort and then at regular intervals throughout the implementation process to track the plan’s effectiveness. The implications of what it can do extend beyond saving teachers time, to having useful applications in the context of other initiatives and interventions at schools and MATs across the country. CONTACT: To find out more about WriQ, contact 028 9442 8105, email info@texthelp.com or visit text.help/teachsecondary-wriq MARTIN MCKAY text.help/teachsecondary-wriq [ MEET THE TEAM ] Mark Schwartz,WriQ Product Manager After spending 16 years teaching a variety of subjects and levels in North America, Mark recently joined the WriQ team at Texthelp. Jason Carroll, Director of Product Management Jason’s focus is on helping to make smart, easy-to-use products that help diverse learners of all ages to succeed. BIO: Martin McKay is the founder and Chief Technical Officer of Texthelp – a developer of education technology solutions to support the learning of reading, writing and languages 2016 WriQ launches as a Google Docs Add-on in the US; over two years, we collect an enormous data set of over 80,000 docs that lets us create standardised norms for assessing writing. 2019 The WriQ Google Docs Add-on is rebuilt as a Chrome extension, allowing teachers to view and mark errors directly in Google Docs, rather than via a pop-up window. 2019 Teachers, schools and MATs can add custom rubrics to WriQ for writing assessment, to track progress in-line with regional or national assessment criteria. 2020 The WriQ student experience is launched, offering students instant access to their own writing data, immediate feedback and positive nudge notifications, all without teacher intervention. Our Journey