Scrible

January 30, 2020 By Scrible

Scrible Adds Assistive Features for Accessibility and Comprehension

Scrible Edu Plans now include new features to aid reading accessibility and comprehension, including Read Aloud, Dictionary Lookup and Translation!

Why?

Scrible’s annotation tools have always helped students digest articles as they read critically to highlight key points and make comments to capture their thoughts about the text. This is true regardless of whether that reading is tied to a larger project or downstream paper.

Unfortunately, the ability to effectively read and comprehend a text is a vital academic and life skill that many students struggle with due to a learning disability, limited vocabulary or lack of familiarity with a new language.

So, based on educator feedback and requests, we’ve now extended Scrible’s ability to support literacy beyond annotation with 3 new assistive features to support text accessibility and comprehension – Read Aloud (i.e. text-to-speech), Define and Translate!

Not Just for SPED and ELL

While originally designed to support special needs and ELL (English language learner) students, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) taught us that designing for students with particular challenges actually benefits all students, including those without the challenges. So, these new features can actually help a broad range of students. For example, the Translate feature helps native English speakers digest a foreign language text.

What’s Different?

You might’ve seen these kinds of features elsewhere. So, what’s different here? Well, building them atop our existing platform and alongside our annotation system allowed us to combine them with that system to offer unique capabilities and enable novel teaching and learning experiences.

For example, a teacher can pre-annotate an article to indicate which parts a student should focus on. The student can later have just those annotated portions read aloud to help them better absorb the content. In this way, the teacher is able to support the student in a more engaging way than in other systems where the student might use a standalone read-aloud feature.

Furthermore, our Define and Translate features take advantage of the Sidebar concept underlying our Comments Sidebar, Citation Sidebar, etc. So, we now have a Definitions & Translations Sidebar where definitions and translations are displayed and retained. Why does that matter? Because a student can later revisit the Sidebar to review the words and phrases they found challenging. In contrast, in some other products, definitions and translations are ephemeral… displayed temporarily and inaccessible later.

Where to Find the New Stuff

Each of the new features has its own new button in the Scrible Toolbar. In each case, you can select text and click the button to have the text read aloud, defined or translated. Alternatively, you can click the button to toggle it on and then select the text to be read aloud, defined or translated. As described above, definitions and translations appear in a new Definitions & Translations Sidebar and are saved there for later.

New assistive features in the Scrible Toolbar and the new *Definitions & Translations Sidebar*

Read Aloud

Read Aloud Selected Text

Select passages and click the Read Aloud Button in the Toolbar to have the passages read aloud in a voice of your choice.* Alternatively, you can toggle the Button on first to enter Read Aloud Mode and then select the passage.

**Toggling on the *Read Aloud Button* and selecting text to be read aloud**

In this case, every text selection you make with the modified mouse cursor is read aloud. The selected text is underlined orange and each word is underlined green as it’s spoken. The reading can be paused or cancelled via the Read Aloud Context Menu that appears over the selection.

**Selected text shown as it’s read aloud**

Read Aloud Annotations

Click on an annotation to see its Annotation Context Menu and then click the Read Aloud icon in it to have the annotated text read aloud.

You’ll see the annotated text underlined orange and each word in it is underlined green as it’s spoken.

Choose a Voice, Pitch and Speed

Choose Read Aloud Settings from the Read Aloud Button dropdown in the Toolbar to see options to change the voice to a different gender or accent and to change the speed and pitch of the voice.

Define

Use the Define feature to find the definition for an unfamiliar word. When you select the word and click the Define Button in the Toolbar (or toggle the Button on and then select the word), the definition appears in the Definitions & Translations Sidebar, where it’s saved and remembered for later. So, if you’re later re-reading a passage and need to see its definition again, it’s right there for you.

Translate

Use the Translate feature to translate to/from 50 different languages. Click the Translate Button Dropdown to see and select the to/from language options. Like with definition results, translations are shown in the Definitions & Translations Sidebar, where they’re saved and remembered for later.

Our Edu Plan users can translate single words. Edu Pro Plan users can also translate a phrase or longer passage.

When translating a word to/from English, you’ll see a translation dictionary type list of possible translations for the word, including the part of speech and back translations for each of the possible translations.

* Available voices for Read Aloud and the ability to highlight the words as they are spoken will vary based on browser, operating system and the voice selected.

October 8, 2018 By Scrible

Scrible Now Supports Co-Teaching

(Image credit: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction)

Educators whose school, district or campus subscribes to Scrible Edu Pro can now add co-teachers to their classes. A co-teacher has the same access to all sections, student assignments and class libraries as the teacher who created the class. For those who sync their classes to Scrible from Google Classroom, we now automatically sync co-teachers in Google Classroom into their classes in Scrible.

You can view the co-teachers for a class by going to your Classroom page in Scrible and choosing your class from the list. This will open the Class Page, which lists the sections of that class. Click the edit icon to the right of the class title to edit the class details.

On the subsequent Edit Class Page, you’ll see a new section for Co-Teachers displaying the current list of co-teachers for the class.

If you’re using Google Classroom, you won’t have the Add Co-Teacher Button. You’ll need to add co-teachers in Google Classroom and let them sync over to Scrible via our Google Classroom Sync.

For classes that aren’t being sync’d from Google Classroom or other applications (like a learning management system (LMS)), click the Add Co-Teacher Button and enter your co-teacher’s email address to invite them.

After they’re invited, when they’re in their Classroom page, they’ll see a pop up notice alerting them of their pending co-teaching invites. When they click on this alert, it’ll pop up a list of co-teaching invites that allows them to accept or decline each invite.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new feature. Let us know what you think!

— The Scrible Team

October 8, 2018 By Scrible

Scrible Revamps Google Docs Add-on

We’ve totally revamped Scrible Writer, our Google Docs Add-on that helps you bring your research into the writing process in Google Docs. It’s now faster and let’s you view and insert your outline and more easily view and edit your bibliography.

Wait. What’s Scrible Writer again?

To recap, Scrible Writer is our powerful writing companion for Google Docs. Here’s an excerpt showing the previous version of Scrible Writer from our general Scrible Edu demo video (which’ll be updated to reflect recent product changes):

Scrible Writer requires and works with your Scrible account. You can find and install it in your Google Docs account via the G Suite Marketplace or by searching for it within Google Docs under Add-ons > Get add-ons…. Once you’ve installed it, it’ll always appear as one of your add-ons under the Add-ons menu. Whenever you want to use Scrible Writer, simply select it from that menu to load it as a Sidebar that’ll appear to the right of your Doc. That Sidebar represents a slimmed down version of your Scrible Library so that you have easy access to your research while writing a paper. The first time you load Scrible Writer, you’ll need to connect it to your Scrible account.

Previously, Scrible Writer contained your Library’s sources so you could easily browse and full-text search your Library from within a Google Doc while writing your paper. You could click on an annotated passage or comment shown in the Sidebar to add it to your paper. Annotated passages could be inserted as quotes in the Doc and their corresponding in-text citations were automagically inserted too. The citations were also as added to your Bibliography, which was automagically maintained and inserted on the last page of your Doc so you can spend less time on tedious manual formatting and more time crafting your brilliant paper!

Access to the various Scrible Writer features depends on which Scrible plan you’re on. You get a lot in a free plan (Basic or Edu), but of course you get much more if you’re on a paid plan (Edu Pro).

Awesome! Now, what’s new?

First, we’ve re-engineered how Scrible Writer works with Google Docs so that inserting quotes is much faster now.

Second, we’ve updated the interface to a new tabbed layout. Edu Pro users will see 3 tabs – Sources, Outline and Bibliography.

The Sources Tab works as Scrible Writer worked before. Browse and search your sources and annotations. Click to insert annotations as quotes into the Google Doc and the corresponding in-text citation is inserted as well and your Bibliography is automagically updated in the background.

The Bibliography Tab (available to Edu and Edu Pro users) replaces the previous Bibliography Preview Window that used to float over the Doc when you clicked the previous red Bibliography Button in the Sidebar. That Button is now gone. You can simply click on the Bibliography Tab to view the current state of your Bibliography at any time. You can change the citation style for your paper here (e.g. from MLA to APA). You can review what sources are in your bibliography and remove sources or edit their details right in the sidebar. For Edu Pro users, all changes are synced in real time back to the Bibliography Tab in your Library. Nice!

The Outline Tab (available to Edu Pro users) allows you to view the outline you created in the Outline Tab of your Scrible Library. You can click the Insert Link to insert the entire outline into the Doc, including in-text citations that accompany quotes. You can also click the Edit Link to navigate back to the Outline Tab in your Library, where you can edit the outline.

You’ll also notice a new Status Icon to the left of the Sources Tab. This Status Icon will let you know if your bibliography and in-text citations in the Doc are out of date. If you change your bibliography via the Bibliography Tab in your Library or update the citation details for any of the sources cited in the Doc, the Status Icon will change from a green checkmark to a red exclamation mark (). Clicking this will trigger Scrible Writer to refresh your in-text citations and the bibliography on the last page of your Doc. This refresh also happens in the background automatically every time you insert a quote/citation into the Doc. While this is happening, the Status Icon appears as a syncing yellow spinner icon and then turns into the green check mark. Powerful stuff!

We think these updates make Scrible Writer much easier to use. Let us know if you have any questions or run into problems!

— The Scrible Team

October 8, 2018 By Scrible

Scrible Expands Support for Books and Print Sources

(Image credit)

Scrible Edu Pro has long offered the ability to add books and print sources to your bibliography via the Add Offline Source feature. We’ve now taken this to the next level! The Add Offline Source option has been replaced with two new options: Add Book and Add Print Source.

Working with Books

When you add a book, as you enter its title, we suggest potentially matching books and automatically populate the citation details. You can also enter a book’s ISBN to search by that instead.

Once you’ve selected the book and clicked the Create Button, the book is added to your Library as a new source.

When you open it, you’re brought into our new Book and Print Source Editor. It allows you to enter passages and annotations from these sources into Scrible. Simply click the Add Passage Button to show the Passage Editor and then type in a passage and enter its corresponding page number in the book. Page numbers are optional but encouraged because passages are grouped by page to help keep them ordered correctly. The Editor displays each page with the all of passages you’ve entered for that page. By default, passages are added to a page in the order you enter them, but you can drag and drop them within a page to reorder.

While editing a passage, a mini annotation toolbar appears atop the Passage Editor with options to set the color and style of the passage. You can apply an annotation type and color to each passage so you can maintain a consistent annotation style across all of your digital sources (e.g. webpages and PDFs) and print sources (e.g. print books, magazines, newspapers, etc.).

Once entered, as with annotated text in digital sources (e.g. webpages and PDFs), you can apply tags to annotated passages and add comments to them using the icons appearing to the left of each passage when you hover over it.

As with webpages and PDFs, all annotations and tags for book and print sources flow through the system and appear in the Sources Sidebar in the Outline Editor in your Library and the Scrible Writer Google Docs Add-on.

Working with Print Sources

The screenshots shown here are for the example of working with a book, but what about print sources like a print magazine or newspaper? Similar story. When you choose Add Print Source in a Library, the print source you enter is added to that Library. Opening the source brings you into our Book and Print Source Editor. As with books, you can add a page number and passage so that your entered passages are grouped and ordered by page. You can apply annotation styles/colors, attach comments and add tags to the passage. In this case, however, the icons are a bit different. Instead of the book icon in your Library, the print source appears as a newspaper icon and the Add Passage Button is similar . As with the book annotations and tags, everything for a print source flows through the system and appears in the Sources Sidebar in the Outline Editor in your Library and the Scrible Writer Google Docs Add-on.

We’d love to hear your feedback on these capabilities. Let us know!

— The Scrible Team

October 8, 2018 By Scrible

Scrible Improves Tagging System

(Image credit)

We’ve revamped Scrible’s tagging system to make it easier and more intuitive to create, apply and manage tags for your sources and annotations!

Add/Remove Tags to/from Sources and Annotations

When hovering over a source (under the Sources Tab) or annotation (under the Annotations Tab) in your Library, an Actions Drawer appears at the far right end of the source/annotation with various options for that source/annotation. One of those options is the ability to edit the tags for that source/annotation.

Just click on the tags icon to display the Add/Remove Tags Window, which allows you to view the tags already applied to the source/annotation. Start typing to see matching tags that already exist in the Library. Select one of those or type a new tag and apply it the source/annotation. Hovering over an already-applied tag reveals a red x at the right end of the tag. Clicking the x removes the tag from the source/annotation.

Edit and Delete Tags

The ability to edit tag names and delete tags from a Library is now right in the Tags Sidebar at the left side of the Library. When hovering over a tag in the Sidebar, options to edit and delete the tag appear to its right.

Bulk Adding/Removing Tags

Applying/removing tags to/from multiple sources/annotations in a Library can be accomplished by selecting the sources/annotations and clicking the Tags Button atop the Library.

This displays the Bulk Add/Remove Tags Window, which contains a list of all tags in the Library. Simply check or uncheck multiple tags to apply or remove them from the selected sources/annotations. A horizontal line through the checkbox for a tag indicates that the tag is applied to some – but not all – of the selected sources/annotations.

We’d love to hear your feedback on these capabilities. Let us know!

— The Scrible Team