Our latest thoughts from the world of technology in education & the workplace

Texthelp Blog - Our latest thoughts from the world of technology in education & the workplace

Blog

This is a fun & easy way to get involved, and will bring some positivity into your teacher's classroom! Feel free to get creative or download one of our templates to color & share. 

teacher-appreciation-day-flower-pot-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

teacher-appreciation-day-donut-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

teacher-appreciation-day-light-bulb-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

teacher-appreciation-day-rainbow-colouring-poster-us-size.pdf

Send your teacher a card with all the reasons why you appreciate them and show off your writing skills at the same time. Use our template to get started and then either send it to your teacher directly or upload it to your digital classroom environment. 

teacher-you-are-a-_class-act_-because.pdf

thank-you-for-being-a-great-teacher.pdf

teacher-you-are-amazing-because.pdf

If you're thinking of gifting your teacher, here are some ideas they'll appreciate! Digital gift cards are a great option. You could take your teacher to the movies with a free movie on Amazon Prime, support a local restaurant, or subscribe to a service like Teacher’s Black Box or Teacher’s Crate. Think about what your teacher would enjoy. 

If you haven’t been able to arrange a gift, don’t worry - you could record a short video message for your teacher instead. They will really appreciate the thought & effort, and parents can join in too! Here’s a video that our Texthelpers created to give you some inspiration:

It's 'Ofishal'!! Teachers are a great catch!


Award your teacher with a digital certificate or sticker

It's time for you to become a teacher for a day! Download our certificate template and award it to your teacher in recognition of some of their best traits. Or choose from our selection of digital stickers to send to your teacher for all their hard work: 

teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-04.png

teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-03.png

teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-02.png

Teacher-appreciation-day-stickers-01.png

We’d love to know if you try out any of these ideas. Leave a comment below or share your finished masterpieces with us on Twitter @texthelp or on our Facebook page. 

Teacher Appreciation Week is running May 3 - May 7 and involves a week's worth of activities, events and thank you gifts. We’ve put together some of the best ways to thank your teacher.

Celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week

What a year it's been for teachers! Adapting to new ways of teaching and communicating with students, juggling work life and family, dealing with constant uncertainty... the past twelve months have been a steep learning curve for educators everywhere. 

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, and although we do our best to support teachers year-round, we think this week is the perfect opportunity for students and parents to extend their special thanks to teachers for everything they've done to support student learning in this difficult year. 

We've put together some ideas for how you can thank your teacher, either remotely or in person. Read on to check them out. 

Ten years ago, a man named Joe Devon made a plea…

“For some people, an accessible Internet literally makes a world of difference…. Although I’m a backend programmer, I’m still ashamed at how little I know....Let’s work together and fix this oversight in our knowledge. As a community, we can work together to change the world. First, let’s agree on a Global Accessibility Awareness Day.”

Today, we’re celebrating a decade of global awareness around digital accessibility. And some huge achievements in the digital space. It just goes to show how one spark can light up the path to change!

And now’s not the time to get complacent - let’s keep the light shining of digital access and inclusion.

Join us for our virtual conference on 20th May - it's free.

On 20th May, we’ll be partnering up with 11 organisations for our first ever Festival of Accessibility. And we’re inviting you to join us - for free.

We’re marking 10 years of GAAD with our first ever Festival of Accessibility

Equity in the Math Classroom

Equity in the math classroom with José Vilson

Equity in the classroom - in this video José Vilson shares his thoughts on equity in the math classroom. 

This Math Awareness Month, we are bringing you José Vilson’s thoughts on equity in the math classroom.  

Back at the start of this school year we hosted a keynote with José Vilson, a math educator, blogger, speaker and activist in New York City, NY. José has written and spoken about education, math and race for a number of organizations and publications, such as The New York Times, Education Week and Huffington Post to name a few. 

At Texthelp, customer needs and requests drive our innovation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the features we have added to WriQ over the past few years. We are excited to continue that tradition with a host of updates designed to ease teachers' burden and improve the writing process - and feedback - for students.

Until now, the process of creating and sending out assignments has been complicated. There might be one place for creating a rubric, another process for making the assignment itself, and another whole procedure for assessment. WriQ puts all of these things in one place - your WriQ Dashboard. Here, teachers who use Google Classroom can create an assignment, attach a rubric to it, monitor class and student progress, and assess the writing and provide feedback. Students will be able to review the rubric before they start writing - and have it on screen with them as they write!

WriQ automatically knows that a student is working on a project and can show teachers - in real-time! - their progress, current status, and even early data.

When we first created WriQ, we did extensive research to craft grade-specific rubrics in three areas - Narrative, Opinion/Argument, and Informative/Explanatory.  Those rubrics have now been used by thousands of teachers. Feedback has been consistently positive, but we want to go a step further - offering teachers the chance to tweak the rubrics to suit their specific work. 

In your WriQ Dashboard, you can now see an additional tab next to "My Rubrics," labeled "Texthelp Rubrics." Clicking on this tab will show you a list of all TH rubrics, and clicking on any of those will allow you to tweak and save that rubric.

Finally, we've made a couple updates to the feedback available within WriQ. First, we heard you loud and clear, and have doubled (!) the amount of space teachers now have to leave written feedback.  We've also added a word cloud based on the content of the document, that students can check out after you've assessed their work.

WriQ Features Update May 2021

WriQ Update April 2021

At Texthelp we work in an agile way, constantly taking on board our customer feedback and updating products. We don’t wait to update once or twice a year, the updates and improvements are continual. We want to make sure our customers are working with the best versions of our products to meet their needs. It’s a collaborative process with our customers at the center of what we do. 

Our latest product updates have been to WriQ®, as we’ve taken teacher feedback onboard and have made some improvements. Take a look below to find out more. 

Write Based On Expertise, Authority & Trust

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines share an important acronym to consider with readability of content: E-A-T, which stands for “Expertise, Authority, and Trust.” To improve readability, the content and its author should aim to meet these quality standards. When a writer is an expert about a topic, it is much easier to achieve a readable flow of information. With that said, make sure you are an expert when writing. If you are not an expert, find someone who is more knowledgeable. 

Personally, the best way I have found to improve the readability of the content I write is to look at brands I admire and find their brand book. In any comprehensive brand book, there’s always a section on writing. For example, Google has a great section on writing as a result of having a multinational brand that needs to speak to people outside just the US. Mailchimp is another great example because they are just phenomenal.

Too often, we feel like we don't have time to write specific content for a specific audience, and that's our downfall. Take the time to write for who your intended readers are, especially for social. For example, if it's a tweet, be short and to the point. If you're creating a Facebook post, realize that you're likely in front of a female audience, potentially in their 30-40s. And if it's Instagram, write for the twenty-somethings. A few tweaks and format changes may make all the difference!

All writers and webmasters should ensure that their content is Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust (POUR). These are the basic tenants of the POUR principles of accessibility, and a great standard to establish for your website. Focusing on the ability for all types of readers to understand your writing will naturally improve your content. One easy way to do this is avoiding industry jargon if possible. If jargon is necessary for a specific piece, provide definitions and explanations that follow.

The strongest content writing is most often the simplest. I've edited so many blog posts, video scripts, emails, and whitepapers by lots of great writers and marketers. The easiest way to go from skimmable to confusing fast is to let your sentences get too long. So skip the semi-colon and commit to a full stop so you can write great, readable content.

When writing content, it is important to avoid big chunky paragraphs. Not only is it less pleasing to the eye, but it actually makes the reader less likely to read your piece! Consider breaking up your piece into smaller, more scannable paragraphs. It will improve your readability score in Yoast & lead to higher engagement rates.

It’s always easier to read any content if things like italics, bolding, and bullet points are included in the text. However, you should avoid randomly using them without any plan or structure. The key lies in being consistent when applying these elements. If you decide to use a specific font for your headings, make sure to keep it the same for the entire article. The same rule applies to paragraph spacing or introducing quotations into your text. Don’t make the mistake of introducing too many techniques to improve content’s readability. By doing so, you will confuse your readers instead of creating a text that is easy to read.

Understanding the foundations of readability enables writers to get useful insights to improve content. Using data from readability score systems like the Gunning Fog index, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade can provide an objective outlook at just how readable text may be for an audience. The higher the readability scores, the easier content may be to read. If you are looking to improve readability, look to these scoring systems as a helpful guide. 

We hope you learned a lot from our friends at Terkel. If you'd like to learn more, check out our page all about readability best practice.

Terkel creates community-driven content featuring expert insights. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published. 

From checking out company brand books to keeping paragraphs small and scannable, here are eight tips to improve content readability.

8 writing tips for improving readability of blog post content

We asked content writers and business leaders for their best tips on how to improve content readability. From checking out company brand books to keeping paragraphs small and scannable, we have great tips to improve content readability.

Here are eight writing tips to improve the readability of your content...

“When am I ever going to need to use this?”

Teachers across the globe have been asked this question, or a variation of it for as long as there have been teachers and schools. It’s fair to say that math teachers might get asked this question more often than some of their colleagues from other subjects. Sure, unless you are an engineer, a rocket scientist or an actuary then you mightn’t need to use complex math as part of your daily work. However, math is a life skill that we are taught in school, and that stays with us forever, whether we realize it or not. 

Since you're reading this blog, it’s likely that you already know that math is part of everyday life - and you want to show your students just how important math skills are. So let’s take a look at a few examples of math in action.

Math and building

It’s hard to build anything without math, from calculating how many bricks you need, how much concrete or how much electricity cable - math is vital when you are trying to build anything. It’s not just professional construction workers either, if you are taking on any kind of DIY project you will need math to figure out how much paint or wood you’ll need to get the job done. 

So whether your students become construction workers or architects in the future - they will need math. If they are just tackling a project at home themselves then the skills they learn in the math classroom could save them money. 

*Class Tip: You could set a building project in the classroom, challenging students to make a house out of boxes or a structure out of wooden blocks. This can help teach math- related skills like measuring, estimating, patterns and following directions. 

Math Cake

We probably use math in the kitchen more than any other room of the house. Cooking and baking is both a science and an artform, and it would be impossible without math. What a tasty way to see math in action. 

Recipes are essentially mathematical algorithms, and there are many ways in which math comes into practice:
- Measuring ingredients
- Multiplying and dividing if you want to make more or less of something (usually more)
- Converting the recipe from centigrade to fahrenheit 
- Converting a recipe from mls or grams to cups 
- Figuring out cooking time 

*Class Tip: You could try a “no bake” recipe in the classroom, like no bake cookies or snacks to share as a class. 

Short changed

Another great example of math in action is shopping, whether you’re shopping for food or a new outfit - math is essential. Otherwise how would you know how much you can afford to spend, whether a discount is really a bargain, or if the cashier has given you the right change.  

*Class Tip - get your students to play “estimate the total” when they are next at the grocery store with their family. The closest answer wins! 

Early or late?

Math and time go hand in hand, understanding time can be a difficult concept - but once your students have mastered this skill it is one they will use constantly.  Teach your students the value of time by looking at both digital and analog clocks, you could then show how time changes around the world, and then talk about how everyone likes to spend their precious free time. 

*Class tip: Your class could set a goal of how long they will take to complete a task, create to-do lists, rank tasks by priority and talk about timetables. There are loads of ways to look at time online using train timetables or the world clocks. You could set a global challenge, getting students to calculate times in capital cities across the world. 

Math could save your life

When you travel you do it with math, figuring out when you need to leave to get to a certain place, and how long it will take to get there, do you have enough gas to get there or will you have to stop on the way - this is all math in action. 

Your students may not remember the days before GPS and Google Maps but it might be a fun project to look at how people used to navigate. Math reading is a dying skill but is a handy one to have if your phone runs out of battery or you have no signal. 

Learning that the sun sets in the west in the northern hemisphere, or how to spot the North Star could be enough to save someone’s life, if they are lost in the wilderness. 

*Class Tip: Plan pretend trips or expeditions so you can show your class how to orientate themselves on a map. Or challenge them to find the best way from point A to point B, this is also a good opportunity to look at all the symbols on maps. You could ask your students to create their own treasure map of a far flung island. 

So there you have it, 5 ways to show your students math in action. Math is everywhere, there’s no getting away from it. The next time someone asks you “when will I ever need to use any of this?” you can share these examples. 

“When am I ever going to need to use this?” Teachers across the globe have been asked this question, or a variation of it for as long as there have been teachers and schools. Since you are reading this blog, it’s likely that you already know that math is part of everyday life - and you want to show your students just how important math skills are. So let’s take a look at a few examples of math in action.

Real World Math - 5 ways to see math in action

Real World Math - 5 ways to see math in action - “When am I ever going to need to use this?” Teachers across the globe have been asked this question, or a variation of it for as long as there have been teachers and schools. Since you are reading this blog, it’s likely that you already know that math is part of everyday life - and you want to show your students just how important math skills are. So let’s take a look at a few examples of math in action.

Blog

Celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week

We’re marking 10 years of GAAD with our first ever Festival of Accessibility

Equity in the math classroom with José Vilson

WriQ Update April 2021

8 writing tips for improving readability of blog post content

Real World Math - 5 ways to see math in action

Categories

Education

Solutions

Products

Workplace

Solutions

Products

Resources

Resource center

Events

Learn & Support

Company