AI Tools for Teacher Writing Assistant

  1. WordTune Spices

WordTune Spices is an AI-generated writing assistant that can “spice up” your writing by suggesting new sentences to add to your text. Users simply click on a ‘+’ symbol at the end of a sentence and WordTune Spices offers suggestions several for the proceeding sentence. It essentially will “auto complete” your paragraphs by providing lots of sentences to include.

There are a dozen categories to provide new sentences for you to consider. They include: Continue Writing, Explain, Emphasize, Expand On, Give an Example, Counterargument, Define, Give an Analogy, Statistical Fact, Make A Joke, Historical Fact, Nature Fact, and Inspirational Quote. After selecting a feature, say Explain, WordTune Spices will suggest 5 sentences that “explain” what you wrote in the previous sentence. Simply scroll through the suggestions and choose the sentence you prefer.

WordTune Spices also has helpful menu items to shorten or expand your paragraphs, write in a casual or formal tone, or simply rewrite your sentences. it will also suggest word rephrasing or substitutions. WordTune also has a Chrome extension free for download, which enables you to use in Google Docs, Gmail, and more. Moreover, WordTune Spices can take a sentence in a foreign language and provide rephrasing suggestions in English.

Pricing: The Free version of Wordtune offers up to 10 rewrites per day. The Premium version costs $9.99/month or $119.88/year.

URL: https://app.wordtune.com/spices

Tom’s Take:

WordTunes Spices is my favorite AI assistant for non-fiction writing. It’s simple, versatile, and provides a wide range of suggestions to direct and develop my sentences. I regularly use the Continue Writing, Example, Expand On, Give an Analogy, and Statistical Fact to develop my paragraphs and I find Counterargument useful to help refine my point of view. I use the Casual and Formal options as needed, but don’t find the Shorten and Lengthen features particularly helpful because they treat paragraphs sentence-by-sentence and not “holistically”.

Word Tunes Spices strength and limitation is that it works at this “micro-level” — sentence by sentence — and does not review your writing as a whole to suggest “macro” revisions. In other words, it doesn’t provide grammar and syntax tools to review your entire document as a whole. For that, you need to go elsewhere — like ChatGPT. I find it works best if I provide it with at least an outline of topic sentences for my document (and ideally a supportive sentence in each paragraph) and let it make its recommendations with a basic foundation in place.

2. ChatGPT

ChatGPT by OpenAI is an AI chatbot that can write lengthy essays, craft poetry, write and debug code, explain difficult scientific and mathematical concepts in simple terms, write screenplays, create song lyrics, critique art pieces, and more. In other words, ChatGPT is an extremely versatile writing assistant that can both generate and review written documents.

ChatGPT can assist teachers in a wide range of writing tasks. For example, teachers leverage ChatGPT to develop curriculum materials, provide feedback on student work, develop rubrics, generate discussion questions and more. ChatGPT is also capable of writing directions for student assignments, producing outlines for extended topics, and composing various correspondence with students and educators. ChatGPT can also be used to generate lesson plans, student activities, and assessments. Teachers can also use it to create personalized feedback for each student's work.

Additionally, ChatGPT can suggest alternatives to sentence structures or phrasing as well as correct spelling, grammar, or formatting errors. It can revise and summarize a written product as well as adjust it’s tone.

Pricing: ChatGPT-4 is $20/month, but ChatGPT version 3.5 is free.

URL: https://chat.openai.com/

Tom’s Take:

ChatGPT by OpenAI is an AI chatbot that can write lengthy essays, craft poetry, write and debug code, explain difficult scientific and mathematical concepts in simple terms, write screenplays, create song lyrics, critique art pieces, and more. In other words, ChatGPT is an extremely versatile writing assistant that can both generate and review written documents.

ChatGPT can assist teachers in a wide range of writing tasks. For example, teachers leverage ChatGPT to develop curriculum materials, provide feedback on student work, develop rubrics, generate discussion questions and more. ChatGPT is also capable of writing directions for student assignments, producing outlines for extended topics, and composing various correspondence with students and educators. ChatGPT can also be used to generate lesson plans, student activities, and assessments. Teachers can also use it to create personalized feedback for each student's work.

Additionally, ChatGPT can suggest alternatives to sentence structures or phrasing as well as correct spelling, grammar, or formatting errors. It can revise and summarize a written product as well as adjust it’s tone.

  • Pricing: ChatGPT-4 is $20/month, but ChatGPT version 3.5 is free.

  • URL: https://chat.openai.com/

3. “Help Me Write” Google Docs

“Help Me Write” is not a “tool” per se, but rather a feature of Google Docs and Gmail. But since it’s such a useful feature, and so many teachers use Google Docs and Gmail to write, it is worthy of inclusion in this list. And it’s a feature that will greatly simply and accelerate the process of writing teaching materials and the like.

“Help Me Write” enables user to write extended text in Google Docs and Gmail with limited input. Teachers can provide a brief description of what they wish to write —say, a lesson plan for 10th graders on environmental degradation— and Help Me Write will write the lesson plan. You can then revise the text, rephrase it, or make it more formal, more concise, or more detailed. You can also create a new version of the text, but you can’t go back to the previous generated version.

Price: Free, but it is being rolled out to Business Enterprise customers first and is not available in some countries.

URL: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/13447609?hl=en

Tom’s Take:

“Help Me Write” is an intuitive and valuable tools to speed up the creation of documents. And since so many schools have Google for Education accounts teachers are already using Google Docs and Gmail en masse to write teaching materials and correspondence. But, it is not widely accessible as yet and is not available at all in some countries. (To check if you have access to it, open a document on Google Docs and look for “Help me write” (Labs) on the left of the document.) Help Me Write can you save time and improve the quality of your writing. And its easier to stay organized, since Help Me Write create templates for common types of documents and emails. But it doesn’t have the range of sentence and paragraph-development features available in WordTune Spices. And, like ChatGPT, it may require an effective prompt to elicit the writing you want.

AI Tools for Teachers

My goal is to help teachers find AI tools to assist them with their various teaching related responsibilities.

As I review AI tools I have three main criteria in mind:

  1. A robust range of features to help teachers.

  2. An intuitive interface to help teachers

  3. An affordable price for teachers (and schools).

I color code my rating of each criteria as follows:

  • GREEN= Very Good

  • YELLOW= Fair

  • RED = Poor

I do not accept money for reviews.

- Tom Daccord

Tools worth mentioning

Grammarly

For years Grammarly has served as a useful writing revisor, checking grammar and syntax and making suggestions to improve your writing. More recently Grammarly has introduced the AI-infused GrammarlyGo and become a more versatile writing assistant that can help writer with formality, tone, and clarity.

I used Grammarly for years to check grammar while writing emails to help improve them. And it served my purposes well. But GrammarlyGo AI-integration is not as extensive and impressive as WordTune Spices and so I didn’t renew my subcription.

Price: There is a Free version for basic revisions, but if you want the AI-generated GrammarlyGo features you’ll need to sign up for a Premium account at between $11.66 - $29.95/month.

URL: https://www.grammarly.com/grammarlygo

Quillbot

Quillbot AI is an online tool that leverages AI to help users reword and rewrite sentences, paragraphs, and even whole documents. In simple terms, it’s a paraphrasing tool. Quillbot aims to improve user’s writing by suggesting more natural and polished language and enables you to you rephrase text in multiple ways by choosing amongst various writing “modes”. In addition to its Paraphrase tool, it also offers a Grammar Checker, Plagiarism Checker, Co-Writer, Summarizer, and Translator.

Free users will be hamstrung by its 125 word limit for paraphrasing. So, you might want to try Bing as a free alternative. That said, Quillbot offers many more modes to choose from than Bing in addition to other features.

Price: Free = 125 words paraphrased; Premium = unlimited paraphrased at $9.99/month

URL: https://quillbot.com/

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