Effective Literacy Website Review: NoRedInk

NoRedInk (https://www.noredink.com) is a web-based program designed to help students improve their grammar and writing skills. CEO and founder, Jeff Scheur, decided to launch the program after eight years of grading over 15,000 papers as an English teacher. He is joined along by a team of advocates, designers, engineers, and even more educators to work towards their mission of building better writers. The program offers a great deal of their standards-based content for free, but premium accounts are also available.

For teachers interested in utilizing NoRedInk, the website does a fair job introducing its new users with a guide-through that includes a brief welcome video and an interactive demo set up to start off with. After setting up a class, teachers can assign work, review student data, or look into the curriculum library through their dashboard. To name a few, identifying adjectives, capitalization, inserting commas, and subject-verb agreement are a few skills that can be found in the library.

On a free account, teachers can choose between three activities to assign: diagnostic, practice, or quiz. The diagnostics help gauge student understanding at the beginning of a unit or semester. The practices are made up of adaptive exercises that are mastery-based and guide students through scope-and-sequence. Quizzes are designed as summative assessments to evaluate understanding at the end of a unit.

Targeting engagement, NoRedInk provides interactive lessons consisting of friendly visuals, guided instruction, and tips prior to the start of a practice. Additionally, NoRedInk combines student interest with learning by including pop-culture and other relatable content to personalize the experience.

If teachers are looking for an additional resource for grammar and writing, NoRedInk may be worth the look. It is a website designed for teachers by teachers with student improvement in mind. With NoRedInk, students can practice grammar, usage, mechanics, and other writing skills through adaptive and personalized exercises. When it comes to tracking student progress, teachers will also appreciate the automatic grading and reports that can provide valuable information in further driving teacher instruction.