If you are like me, when things get repetitive you start to think, “This is tedious. I need a robot to do this form me.” Am I right? This semester, my students have been sending me about 50 emails a week and hundreds of text messages. I don’t keep office hours. I just answer student
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Automated Essay Scoring Explained
Written skills are an essential form of communication. Because a writing sample, such as an essay, is able to indicate the ability to gather, synthesize, and present information in a clear, logical, and persuasive way, it is often used as a means to assess a student’s creativity, knowledge, and intellect. Consequently, essay assignments are common
Read on »Listicle Writing Tutor
A listicle is a list article. It usually consists of an introduction, three or more list items, and a conclusion. People like to read listicles because they are easy to read. The introduction orients the reader to the listicle’s purpose and author’s credibility. The list items are usually arranged in the order of priority, form
Read on »Automated Essay Evaluation for Innovative Teachers and A+ Students
Get your essay scored and corrected automatically with this essay checker. It can score 4 types of essays: opinion, argument, film analysis, and literary.
Read on »How to create a career-summary chatbot
A great writing project for ESL students to try in 2020 is to create a speech recognition enabled chabot about a career that interests them. See this example of an interactive career-related chatbot. Students will love it! Students can create their chatbot online and then export it to a blog or a Learning Management System
Read on »5 Persuasive Essay Writing Tools
Writing a persuasive essay is a complex task. Because the goal of a persuasive essay is to present one side of a tightly organized argument with supporting arguments and evidence, there are a number of skills you will need to write a good one. Sometimes called an opinion essay, the persuasive essay is widely used
Read on »How can I automatically evaluate opinion essays?
Do you teach opinion essays? Many teachers do. It is a common practice in English Second Language teaching to ask college level students to write a 4-5 paragraph opinion essay on a range of topics. An opinion essay goes by many names. Often, it is called the hamburger essay, the 1-3-1 essay, the persuasive essay,
Read on »Is my cover letter correct?
Let me help you write a better cover letter. I won’t give you a lengthy list of dos and don’t. Just submit the letter you have written and I will tell you how to improve it. If you teach cover letter writing, download a cover letter writing lesson that you can give to your students.
Read on »How should I use the Virtual Writing Tutor in 2020?
Here is how you can use the Virtual Writing Tutor in 2020.
Read on »How can I make an online glossary?
Learn how to make glossaries with terms, definitions, translations, parts of speech, images, and MP3 pronunciation models.
Read on »6 Essay rating tools on the Virtual Writing Tutor
Many teachers would like to give better, more detailed feedback to students on their writing assignments but realize that there are not enough hours in the day to do so. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, faster feedback on essay writing tasks is now possible. The Virtual Writing Tutor offers six types of automated writing
Read on »How do students react to automated film-analysis essay evaluation?
Recently, I reported on the perils and promise of a project I have been working on with Dr. Frank Bonkowski. We created an automated film-analysis essay evaluation system to provide the correction and formative scoring of essays to his advanced English Second Language learners at CEGEP de St-Laurent, in Montreal, Canada. The idea was to
Read on »How can I evaluate an argument essay in 2 seconds?
Many college teachers assign either opinion essays or argument essays to their English Second Language students. These highly structured writing assignments give students practice organizing their ideas and defending a point of view. The goal is to prepare students to go on and write research reports or graduate theses at university. However, when it comes
Read on »Can I evaluate a film-analysis essay automatically?
This article discusses automatically scoring film analysis essays. Here are links to other automated evaluations on the Virtual Writing Tutor. Pen pal exchange project IELTS practice tests Argument essay evaluation system Lately, I have been developing automatic essay evaluations for IELTS and now for college-level academic writing. I sent an email to colleagues in my
Read on »What are the new features on the Virtual Writing Tutor?
Hooray! The BRAND NEW version of the (now) award-winning Virtual Writing Tutor is finally here. It has taken almost a year to add new features and update the code, but it is finally ready. It is a whole lot faster, and there are some very cool new features, too. So, what’s new? Self-scoring IELTS Academic
Read on »Feedback and Links Page
Check your feedback and links on the feedback page. Start by clicking on the feedback link on the navigation menu at the top right, under the share icons. Feedback Tab This tab shows the latest text you submitted to the Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker. Each text is dated. The Virtual Writing Tutor keeps your
Read on »Translate Grammar Checker Feedback to one of 70 Languages
When you create a member’s account on the Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker website, you can get feedback translated to your native language with the click of a button. We use Google’s translation API to translate feedback to any one of the 70 languages currently available. Membership is 100% free, and we don’t send spam.
Read on »Your Friendly Robotic Grammar Checker
We are in the process of updating the Virtual Writing Tutor.com, so now is our opportunity to make the VWT faster, more powerful, and a little friendlier. In order to make the VWT a little friendlier, I have been working with a designer to create a friendly little robot to accompany the feedback you receive
Read on »Essay Checker
Imagine a website that could help students write better essays with automated feedback. Now imagine the same website but with additional commenting tools to help people record audio comments and rate each other’s essays using IELTS and TOEFL rubrics and comments. There you have it: an essay checker for the Virtual Writing Tutor. For a
Read on »Silent Letters: Pronunciation Made Easy
English is semi-phonetic, which means that the way a word is spelled can give clues to its pronunciation but can also be quite misleading. Often, the pronunciation of a word can be very different to what you might predict based on its spelling. One way English is semi-phonetic is the use of silent letters. Silent
Read on »Walk-me-through the Main Features
You may have noticed the latest addition to the Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker main page. It’s a short little walkthrough of the principal features of the grammar checker for newcomers. You only get to see it twice before it disappears forever. Why did we add it? The Problem One usability issue I see again
Read on »Easy Essay Outliner
Just fill out a form to create your outline. What could be easier? Are Essay Outlines Difficult for You? Not any more. I have broken down essay outlining into a series of easy steps. All you have to do is answer a few questions, make a few choices, and the Virtual Writing Tutor builds your
Read on »How to Create a Pen Pal Exchange on the Virtual Writing Tutor
Click here to start a Pen Pal Exchange Click here to read about the features on the Pen Pal Exchange Step 1: Click on “Templates.” Click “New” to create a template from scratch. Give your template a descriptive name. Pen pals will see the name on their dashboards. If you want to try a ready-made
Read on »Pen Pal Exchange Project
Useful links on the pen pals: Start a Pen Pal Exchange project for students on the Virtual Writing Tutor. For instructions on how to create a pen pal exchange for your students, check out these step-by-step pen pal exchange creation instructions for teachers. Click here for an article on pen pals that students can read to
Read on »Membership advantages
Members can check 3000 words at a time, save text and feedback, translate feedback into 70 languages, create hypertext narratives and essay outlines, send PDFs with voice recordings, track errors, play error correction games, post essays to forums for additional feedback, with more features on their way. Features Non-member *Signed-in Member Price Ad-supported Ad-supported, zero
Read on »Target Structures
What are target structures? Optimal second language pedagogy involves a repeating exchange of meaningful messages with a focus on target structures. By “exchange,” I mean that teachers should provide learners with opportunities to create sentences, paragraphs, stories, essays, blog posts, articles or reports that are meaningful to the learner. Learners should express those messages to
Read on »Word Counter
How to Use the Word Counter on the Virtual Writing Tutor When you want to know how many words are in a particular text, paste the text into the text area and click the “Count Words” button. The system will count your words and sentences, and calculate your average sentence length. The text you enter
Read on »Get Help from the Community on the Grammar Checker Forum
New Grammar Checker Forum The Virtual Writing Tutor has added a community forum to its free grammar checker. Post your text, tell the community what kind of help you need, and benefit from the free proofreading service that the community can provide. You can get help with your grammar, spelling, punctuation, and structure. It costs nothing
Read on »Paraphrase Checker
Students sometimes inadvertently plagiarize because they don’t know how to paraphrase. To remedy this gap in their learning, I created a paraphrase checker for the Virtual Writing Tutor. The concept is simple. The system shows you which words are the same and need to be paraphrased. This feature is very useful for students and for blog
Read on »Numbered Diagram of Virtual Writing Tutor Features
Feature List (The numbers below correspond to the numbers on the image above.) Click on the logo to return to the main page. Update your password, newsletter subscription status. Create a free account and login. For added convenience, you stay logged in until you logout. Use speech recognition for hands free operation or to
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