Quill

Quill gives teachers instant access to the kinds of grammar and writing lessons they've usually had to create: authentic writing activities targeting Common Core-aligned concepts. With Quill, the icing on top is that the lessons are adaptive, and students get immediate, instructive feedback as they work through the application. Feedback alerts students to both correct and incorrect examples of usage, and sentence activities include multiple examples of good answers. This helps to alleviate the frustration of simplistic (correct or incorrect) feedback found in other tools, and effectively models success. Paired with the diagnostics, Quill can place students in a good spot for their development and then put them on a path to building their skills. And given the range of grade-level lessons, your students can grow into these exercises as they become more proficient with reading and typing. Of course, it'd always be nice to have more, and there's room for a larger library of activities.

While Quill's tools for assessing good writing are sound in general, the fact that accurate spelling and capitalization factor into students' scores could be good or bad. While these are important foundational skills, this specificity could obscure more important reasons why a particular student is struggling, especially at lower grade levels. Using Quill's dashboard, however, will help. Teachers can view color-coded mastery indicators for students' work -- green for proficient, orange for nearly proficient, red for not yet proficient -- and then click through to see their responses in detail.