The second semester is underway and in this newsletter I am going to share about some digital tools that help teachers and students with the craft of writing. One reminder is that district-wide we have access to Turnitin.com, which is an excellent tool for collecting writing assignments in one place, providing quick feedback, and completing an originality check. Turnitin, however, is primarily an after submission tool for teachers.

I included the link to an excellent article by one of my colleagues, Dr. Scott Petri, who is a social science teacher in Granada Hills. He shares several tools that provide immediate feedback to writers. The two I highlighted with how-to videos are Grammarly and the Hemingway App.

• Grammarly is a free extension for Google Chrome that has saved me from sending emails with spelling mistakes or confusing sentences. Anything I type in Chrome is checked by Grammarly.
• The Hemmingway App allows users to paste content into the browser and the program provides quantitative data about sentence errors, verb tense errors, and confusing phrases.
  

If you have any additional suggestions for tools you use for writing your class, please share them with me and your colleagues. We are always looking for new ways to help students improve their writing ability.