About Scribo 3.0 

A series of quick introductory videos are available on the Scribo 3 Intro page.  To learn more, see the note or view the slides.

Live Monitoring in Scribo 3 focuses on the excellent Live Monitor Report. Although it currently is less flexible than previously, it is now much easier to access.  View the Key Data & Growth video  below or the one specific to the new version on Scribo 3 page.  

Teachers can use the Live Monitoring screen during or after students write. 

While Students Write

The main use while students write is to simply monitor their progress by viewing individual student’s in-process compositions. You can assess their degree of engagement by jumping into their texts and, perhaps, having a motivating chat with them.  Another use is to monitor the word count tally to provide overall pacing feedback to the class as well as encourage the most fluent students.

After Students Complete their Writing

Many possible uses of the Live Monitor screen exist. These are mostly informational and provide immediate feedback, rather than teachable insights (as in the next Writing Analysis / Insights Panel section).   Here are a few aspects / data points that might be useful:

• Hand-in all writings - You “call time” on the task and want all writings added into the Writing Analysis.

•  Survey key data - Using the hidden “Monitor Report” provides what can be some very interesting insights.  Note: the first time you run this, it can take a while.  The data table generated can be sorted simply by clicking on column headings.  Suggested details include:

  • Year Level: Rather the year level of the writing, the calculation is actually the Coleman-Liau Readability Index where the number given represents the grade level (U.S.) that a reader would need to be at to comprehend the text.  We can use this as a general indicator of how challenging a text might be to read.  It is NOT an indicator of quality, but simply a quick measure describing the length of words and sentences in a text.  This can be a quite accurate and useful measure, but realise that if a student has many run-on or poorly punctuated sentences, they will be calculated as long, thus raising the level of reading difficulty.  

  • Cohesive Advanced: If a target is increasing students’ use of advanced, “idea-related” cohesives (that reflect interpretation, analysis, causation, etc.), then sorting by this heading quickly shows the count.

  • Vocabulary Advanced %: The percentage of words used beyond the most common 2000 is a very reliable marker of writing quality. Students who write well, tend to use more advanced, specific words.  Note that using such words does not equal “using them well” so, again, this is merely one marker of possible quality writing. 

  • Careless Editing (Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation mistakes): Sorting by either or all of these three headings quickly shows which students’ texts have the most errors.  This is not to argue that every grammatical “error” is actually wrong, it’s simply what the software's text analysis has picked up. Overall, these tend to be generally accurate.