Product Review: WriteOnline

​​In the ocean of writing iPad apps could WriteOnline be one of the Great White Sharks?

Educationally speaking, the answer is yes - because this app has been designed to help secondary pupils with a collection of tools to support their writing across the curriculum, and there aren’t many out there that do that.

WriteOnline supports subjectspecific writing with wordbars and tabbed vocabulary, which pupils tap on to add to their work. As teachers we can easily create our own wordbars too, with alphabetical or topic tabs - but if you are short of time then you can select LearningGrids and access a whole pile of ready made wordbars, which is constantly growing. If you do create your own then you can use the built-in Dropbox to share wordbars and documents across your fleet of iPads (one potential improvement for developers to consider: writers use words and lots of them, so a dictionary feature is an essential part of the toolbox that is missing at the moment).

The app comes with a predictor feature, which basically suggests age-appropriate words based on the structure of pupils’writing. This therefore has the potential to help pupils become more daring in their vocabulary choices, supports spelling knowledge and helps improve writing productivity for those who struggle to get their ideas down.

One of the best features of WriteOnline is that when pupils punctuate a sentence it is read back to them. This active engagement with their work helps them to identify errors, edit and revise their writing. The voices you can choose are Heather (American), Rachel (UK) and Tyler (Australia) – it’s great to have options, but I would love all three to benefit from a little humanising. Of course, pupils will want to personalise how their app looks, and they can do so by using different colour schemes, customising the word predictor level and changing the speed and frequency at which the app speaks.

WriteOnline isn’t a flash Harry app (nor is it at the cheaper end of the scale), but it is functional, it is clever and it will definitely help contribute towards improving pupils’writing, which is so key to their success across the curriculum.

Give it a look.