Community reviews for Quill

Excellent resource. Kids love it. A few glitches here and there, but my students figured it out.

Great for: warm-up, feedback, reinforcement, self paced!

I think this is an added support for students to apply grammar rules. It gives instant feedback, which helps students to review their work. There was an issue with using it on the school server, but my students downloaded the application from the Google store. After that, there haven't been any issues.

"Great way to help students learn their grammar" "Helps me type faster but correctly" "Helps learn proper word choice (very important when typing)" "Could practice be more game like? " " We found a few glitches (we did report them and they were fixed)" All from my fourth grade students and I agree with them.

Quill has replaced my need for Daily Oral Language instruction in the form of copying sentences from a board, or printing out packets of weekly DOL exercises. I encourage students and families to use the program. I have trained students to use Quill in class and then shared it with parents to reinforce grammar lessons taught at school.

Quill is a simple and easy grammar tool to monitor and accumulate data on students. It allows me to differentiate grammar quickly and helps to fill the gaps with potentially missed grammar concepts in previous school years. I have used Quill as a flipped lesson where students completed the Quill assignment at home, and the data drove their differentiated classwork the following day. Quill can be a great asset to an ELA classroom. It helps maintain student accountability and allows the teacher instant feedback to help students struggling with a particular grammar concept. Quill is expanding their grammar lessons and eventually moving into more writing lessons.

The sentences and paragraphs used in the lessons accurately demonstrate the skills in the lesson. The class is easy to set up and a teacher could have this activity up and running in a matter of minutes. This online workbook could be better if the application made allowances for typos, since students are required to type the entire sentence that needs correction. Students who don’t spell or type well make typos and can then be penalized for something that has nothing to do with the actual grammar objective they are practicing. In addition, the teacher scoreboard doesn’t tell what a particular student had difficulty with. Students are given a red, yellow or green flag.

Quill can be a helpful tool, if used wisely. Students practice grammar skills by writing or proofreading passages. I plan to use it with individual or small groups, while I am working with other students. The beauty of the website is the instant feedback. However, is it critical that the teacher conference with the student about his or her results on a lesson, to guide students toward the "next steps" and help the student understand why errors are wrong, and how to correct it next time. As with many resources, the teacher is a necessary component!

Overall, I think this is a great tool to be used in the ELA classroom. I like the price, ease of use, and variety of lessons. Many students have different needs when it comes to language usage skills, and this would allow for easy differentiation. Students could practice lessons at their own pace or it could be used as a whole class activity. It could also be used for a quick mini-lesson activity.

I liked that I could assign students different standards, making it individual. I liked that it had students practice the skill in context. Also, it was clear that they had thought about breaking down common grammar mistakes so that students worked on them in smaller chunks (such as learning the difference between when to use "which" and when to use "that" in a sentence). Still, as it stands, Quill isn't useful enough to make it a grammar program for my classroom. I might continue to use it with students who really struggle with grammar for additional practice (and so I don't have to purchase a grammar book for them) but it isn't robust enough to use regularly with all my students. I think that for Quill to be useful to teachers, they will have to further develop the information teachers receive, how students are taught/introduced to the grammar skill, and develop more levels for middle school students/advanced students.