April's Word Study...

...that's not really a word study.

April. That wonderful time of the year when all middle school students and teachers lose "they" minds.  As evidence, I give you things I've said in the last week alone:

• "No.  I do not want to see the banana in your pants."  (After being asked if I'd like to see the banana in his pants--from a student who started a black market fruit business during guided study by taking the leftover fruit from the cafeteria and selling it for a nickel during study hall). 
• "Please do not eat pancakes in the bathroom, ladies."  Yes, they had syrup and everything.
• "Do you really think if the FBI were coming tomorrow to Logan in order to confiscate phones, they would be kind enough to give us all a 24 hour warning?" (Responding to the out of control rumor that the FBI would descend on our school on the morrow and working themselves up into a tizzy about the whole thing).  
• (This one was not said out loud: Please stop eating your dandruff).  
  

Guys, gals and non-bianary palls, it's only the first week of May.  

No one has every accused middle schoolers of being exceptionally logical humans.

​However, there are some bright spots to the end of the year.  

Here's one of them.  This kid.  He is my tech genius of first period.  Yesterday, he turned me on to a website called @PaperRater (www.paperrater.com).  How can this company have been around since 2011 and I've never found them? (Luckily, I have kids like this dude).
@PaperRater uses A.I. to analyze papers.  Granted, it's a little clickbaity and  I have only used the free version, but things I LOVED were:

• Vocabulary and style analysis
• Plagiarism alerts (although not as savvy as turnitin.com)
• Comparisons for papers written at the same grade level

This service will never replace peer editing or writing conferences correction; however, it does give the kids a good place to start doing their own revisions. 

Each alert is clickable giving more information about the errors they made and how they can fix them. 

It also rates each paper compared to other papers of the same grade level to give students an idea of how they are writing compared to their peers. 

The literature says that this program is powered by A.I..  As I said earlier, I don't think this will take the place of a teacher or peer feedback, but it is a great place to start in the revision journey.