Teacher Made Edtech Tool for Early and Reluctant Writers
In keeping with time honoured tradition, Peter Van Grunsven had been teaching handwriting by demonstrating at the front of the room.
His school emphasised integrating handwriting with spelling, reading and writing by completing a sentence of the week but, the need for a tool that would support and augment his efforts seemed obvious.
“It's challenging to teach handwriting with such a crowded curriculum, and it requires so much time to create handwriting tasks that integrate other subject areas because you really need the starting points and directional arrows. Also, writing requires higher-order thinking. It isn't very easy to turn creative stories from spoken words into written letters,” Van Grunsven says.
“As I wrote each letter and students copied it, they made errors that needed correcting. It was challenging to do this while teaching, so I started making videos of me handwriting the sentence of the week and roamed the room to help individual students while they watched.
“I saw some fantastic results, with students getting one-on-one feedback from me without stopping the lesson flow for all the other students. I thought there must be a program where you could type any sentence, and it shows you how to form each letter, but I couldn't find one for any font, let alone all the different fonts in Australia.”
The progress his students were making after his first experiments using technology encouraged Van Grunsven to create the Handwritingbot platform which lets students use speech-to-text recognition to write stories, then copy the stories using correct letter formation or gives teachers the ability to send individual students or groups of students handwriting exercises tailored to them, such as reversals or words they misspelled in their writing.
“I thought that if I could simplify the writing process by having students dictate their writing and then handwrite it, I could only imagine the possibilities regarding early and reluctant writers.”
Using Handwriting bot, students can record their ideas, a story or a recount of the weekend, have it read back to them at the touch of a button, and then watch an animation of how to form each letter. They can practise writing each letter in the air, then copy it onto paper. Early and reluctant writers that would usually require a teacher or adult helper to type or write for them can create their texts independently.
Teachers can also set writing animations for individual students or groups, such as letters or numbers written incorrectly, words being misspelled and integrate any subject area into a writing lesson using one of the Australian fonts and background lines.
“So many early or reluctant writers can create wonderful spoken stories when you ask them, but when it comes to translating that story to paper, they get stuck. Handwritingbot simplifies this writing process,” he says.
“I have seen students that write three or four words in a writing session create three to four-sentence texts through the increased engagement that Handwritingbot brings and the removal of the barriers to writing that hold them back. I gave my students a spelling test of the words they misspelt in their writing and have been practising with Handwritingbot and found a vast improvement in both early writers learning frequently used words and experienced writers learning to spell more complex words.”
Children who have learning difficulties find writing very challenging but Handwritingbot is like having a teacher for each child, it simplifies the writing process and enables students to simultaneously work on their writing skills, handwriting and spelling and create their own pieces of writing with little to no adult help.
Handwritingbot uses video modelling which is a well-validated intervention strategy for special needs education that reduces stress, is multi-sensory, increases enjoyment, keeps a consistent and familiar format, and is self-paced. It gives special needs students responsibility for their learning and the opportunity to learn to write independently.
We’re increasingly type-focussed but research suggests that handwriting words rather than typing them stimulates neural pathways that accompany quality reading skills. (James & Berninger, 2019). Children also generate better ideas and retain information more easily by handwriting rather than typing (Konnikova, 2014). There is a wealth of other research that supports handwriting over typing.
“My school prioritises handwriting because it is such an integral part of learning to read and write. Having taught all primary school year levels at a range of schools, I noticed incorrect letter formation and reversals for many students and a general struggle with the writing process for others. Different teachers give different descriptions for how to form each letter, and consistency from one year to the next is so important for retention and incremental learning.”
Australia has a wide variety of print, precursive and cursive handwriting fonts prescribed for schools, with significant differences between states and territories and that makes teaching kids handwriting complicated for parents at home because they won't necessarily be teaching a font consistent with what the school is using.
Besides the differences between print and cursive fonts, there are also closed versus open letters, such as p and b, and many ways of writing other letters. With Handwritingbot, students can write a birthday card or create their own stories to share with their family or back at school, with or without parental input.
When using Handwritingbot, teachers have a choice of all the print and precursive fonts used in the Australian states and territories.
“Teaching print prior to precursive handwriting makes handwriting simpler to learn but adds an extra step in the process of learning cursive. Yet many schools internationally seem to be doing away with cursive writing altogether, and many teachers report that secondary school students do not use joined writing anyway.
“Regarding the different fonts for different states and territories, besides making handwriting programs such as Handwritingbot complicated to develop, and the challenges associated with trying to teach students from different states and territories the correct way of forming letters in the region they live, I think it's more important to keep handwriting instruction consistent, whatever font is chosen.”
One of the fonts Handwritingbot uses is 'Sassoon', which is used by phonics program THRASS and Van Grunsven feels that integrating Handwritingbot with other methodologies and teaching strategies is essential in a crowded curriculum.
While it was years in the making, Handwritingbot was formally released in May 2022, “I hired an IT company to make a prototype for me. I had such fantastic, positive feedback that I decided to invest thousands of hours of time and tens of thousands of dollars into animations of all the Australian print and precursive fonts with voiceovers, the ability to skip forward and backward and change the speed of the animations, so students had further agency over their learning,” he says.
See https://handwritingbot.com.au/
References
James, K. & Berninger, V. (2019) Brain Research Shows Why Handwriting Should Be Taught in the Computer Age. LDA Bulletin, 51 (1), 25–30.
Konnikova, M. (2014) What's Lost as Handwriting Fades. The New York Times, June 3, 2014, Section D, Page 1.