Writelike

Listening, learning, and LLMs; our 2024 highlights ✨ What do they look like? 🏆 Won a big grant from MIT Solve for AI-enabled assessments, and subsequently built & released our Frankenstories Scorecard beta into classrooms. Automated reporting for collaborative cross-genre writing? A reality! 🏫 Andrew Duval our co-founder went back into the classroom at Humanitas high school, guest teaching suspense, memoir, argument and analysis units. There is nothing like eating your own dogfood. 🛳️ Released LOTS of teacher-requested features in Frankenstories: a Watch List to tackle meme language, student & class profiles to showcase achievement, voice to text, more reward mechanisms, voting review... just to name a few! 🆓 Made Approval Mode & Watch List free in Frankenstories. Putting every teacher in the driver's seat isn't just about steering the class learning, it helps keep classrooms safe. 🧑🏫 Got to meet with HUNDREDS of teachers and find the growing #frankenfam at conferences, through community interviews, and feedback exchange. It's clear that every classroom is unique and the best ideas come from our community. We can't wait to make more of this happen next year. (Did somebody say Best of 2024 yearbook? Coming soon 👀)

Last week we recategorised Frankenstories' Watched Words and Approval Mode as safety features, and made them free to all users. Here's why 👇

"Don’t get me wrong: I love the new GenAI models and use them all the time. But from an educational point of view, we need students to value their own thoughts, value the act of thinking, creating, & exploring, and want to get better at modelling the world through language so that they will be proficient and reflective users of whatever these new tools turn out to be." Writelike's own Andrew Duval spoke to The Educator about #Frankenstories, #GenAI in schools and what makes our tools unique for the classroom. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/g2_f9-VJ

If you're an English teacher or know an English teacher who is looking for spooky microfiction to read in class, I made a PDF of some of my favourite Halloween Frankenstories games from the last two years. We have stories about evil pens, haunted fireplaces, hypnotic spiders, and the dark side of Thomas the Tank Engine. You can read them for fun or use them as mentor texts for your own class writing (noting that these stories were collaboratively improvised under time pressure and are presented as-is—typos, mishaps, and all). You can download the PDF here: https://lnkd.in/gZ_DxcFG And you can see a crop of more recent sinister stories in the Frankenstories Hall of Fame: https://lnkd.in/gyD9UrYH Check it out! There are some real bangers in there.

What do high school students think about AI and learning to write? Brett Vogelsinger is an English teacher at Central Bucks High School South in Pennsylvania with over two decades of experience teaching in middle and high school. He recently sat down with his students to talk about their writing and how AI interacts with it, and they had a few thoughts: https://lnkd.in/g6JhxUWT

It was only February when we were celebrating 10 million words 🤯 Now our Frankenfam have written over 20 MILLION words of narrative stories, persuasive speeches, Shakespearean texts, and had all sorts of writing fun with Frankenstories 💚 Our Hall of Fame is overflowing with fun, real class writing from across the world if you want to check it out: https://lnkd.in/gguTNkSe #frankenstories #englishteacher #writinggame #classroomfun #teachingwriting #writingpractice #collaborativewriting #edtech

Josh Eyler's new book "Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do About It" is a shot across the bow of traditional systems of schooling. He answered some of my questions about his book and the future of alternative grading as a route to improve student learning. https://lnkd.in/gniiB_9n

We are honoured to be a winner of the Learner//Meets//Future AI-Enabled Assessments Challenge with the support of MIT Solve and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation! 🎉 In many ways Frankenstories is the complete opposite of an AI product, collaborative writing with peers being at the heart of it. We want to use AI to show trends in quality, clarity, and collaboration, so teachers can figure out the best way to use Frankenstories in their class. We're looking forward to making the most of this win and the support it brings.

We had a wonderful time meeting so many great English teachers, academics & literacy folks at the AATE/ALEA 2024 conference in Adelaide this past week! Lots of big topics, but some highlights included: 🚀 Learning how teachers are designing assessments with #GenerativeAI in mind. ✍️ Seeing research into the benefits and challenges of using creative writing in the high school English classroom. 🧑🏫 Listening to author & teacher John Marsden share his personal insights on what it really means to teach writing well. Andrew Duval had fun running an interactive #Frankenstories workshop and being turned into social media fodder by his team 👀 Perhaps selfishly though, we really enjoyed all the teachers that came up to us and said, “We use Frankenstories and our class loves it!”. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us 💚

We had a wonderful time meeting so many great English teachers, academics & literacy folks at the AATE/ALEA 2024 conference in Adelaide this past week! Lots of big topics, but some highlights included: 🚀 Learning how teachers are designing assessments with #GenerativeAI in mind. ✍️ Seeing research into the benefits and challenges of using creative writing in the high school English classroom. 🧑🏫 Listening to author & teacher John Marsden share his personal insights on what it really means to teach writing well. Andrew Duval had fun running an interactive #Frankenstories workshop and being turned into social media fodder by his team 👀 Perhaps selfishly though, we really enjoyed all the teachers that came up to us and said, “We use Frankenstories and our class loves it!”. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us 💚