Writing Tools: The Future is Now

 

Happy New Year, WRSD!

In this post, we want to talk about some recent technological advancements that impact the world of student academic writing.

Local News: Google's Originality Reporting Improves

As some of you have noticed, the Originality Reporting tool within Google Classroom has recently added a major new feature. Student-to-student matching, known more officially as school matches, will now be an option when you select Originality Reporting on a written assignment in Classroom. 

Previously, Originality Reporting would only check the wider web for matching text in a student document. Now, when you select Check Plagiarism on a Classroom assignment, Google will check your students' work against both the wider web and past submissions within our school Google domain.

Learn more about using Originality Reporting in Google Classroom in this article.

World News: Learners Begin to Try Artificial Intelligence (AI) Writing Tools

In recent weeks, AI language tools like ChatGPT and Canva's Magic Write have been making headlines. Teachers and students alike have begun to use these tools to compose written work in desired genres, levels, and lengths. Users have the ability to request written pieces to meet their specific requests and receive results within seconds. As you might imagine, this development has been met with many questions and concerns from educators.

To see this in action, have a look at this video posted by the Wall Street Journal, in which a journalist heads into the classroom to use ChatGPT as a student and document a teacher's reactions.

In our own testing, we saw many of the same kinds of results that the WSJ reporter saw. In the blink of an eye, we generated how-to paragraphs, poems and rap songs, five-paragraph persuasive essays, comparative literature pieces, Javascript functions, and more. There were limitations to what ChatGPT could reference and produce. Sooner than later, ChatGPT and tools like it will overcome some of these limitations.

We know it's both exciting and scary to encounter potentially disrupting new technologies. Fortunately, we have each other. Teachers all over the world are collaborating to learn more and, as the teacher in the WSJ video put it, "get ahead of" this new development. Teachers are also already finding ways to embrace these new tools in the classroom. They're pushing students to read and think more critically, evaluate information, pose better questions, and spend more time editing written work.

One really great venue for collaboration is the professional organization, Massachusetts Computer Using Educators (MassCUE). Consider checking out their very helpful Wakelet page with resources for learning about AI in Education. You can also check out their website and consider attending a future conference - they're great!

We hope to offer more insights and recommendations on this topic in the near future. For now, check it out, chat with your colleagues, and let us know your questions!