Blog

March 25, 2020 By Victor Karkar

How Scrible Supports Remote Teaching and Mitigates Coronavirus Disruption

Remote Teaching

The research and writing process historically involves face-to-face check-ins between students and educators (teachers and librarians in K12; instructors, tutors and librarians in college) during class time in K12 and office hours and scheduled meetings in college. Educators would meet with students to review and provide feedback on their research (e.g. articles, annotations, citations) and writing (e.g. outlines, drafts, bibliographies).

Scrible, the most advanced research and writing platform ever built, centralizes all such student work online and makes it available to educators from anywhere. They can access student work remotely to assess it and provide feedback asynchronously within Scrible, eliminating the need for in-person check-ins.

Coronavirus Disruption

So, Scrible can help educators and students continue their research and writing work despite coronavirus disruption preventing them from meeting in-person. As schools and colleges close or go virtual in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, educators are challenged to quickly adapt their instructional practices to stay connected with their students and keep them moving forward on their research and writing work.

So, in doing our part to help educators and students during this unprecedented crisis, we’re offering our paid education plans for free until July 1, 2020. This gives educators full assignment tracking and management capabilities so they can teach research and writing remotely. Specifically:

K12: Our paid Edu Pro Teacher Plan is free. Request complimentary access here.
Higher Ed: Our paid individual & institutional Edu Pro plans are free. Request complimentary access here.

Stay safe and healthy!
-The Scrible Team

March 16, 2020 By Victor Karkar

Keeping College Instructors and Students Connected During Coronavirus Disruption

We’re offering free access to our paid plans (Edu Pro) until July, 1, 2020, for instructors, students and colleges going virtual due to COVID-19.

We’re offering free access to our paid Teacher Plan until July, 1, 2020, for K12 teachers (and their students) whose school is closing or going virtual due to the coronavirus outbreak.

As colleges close or go virtual in response to the coronavirus outbreak, we want to do our part to help instructors and students stay connected and productive. We’re committed to helping them continue teaching and learning beyond the classroom, lecture hall and office hours.

Scrible is the most advanced platform ever built to support research and writing. The research and writing process historically involves face-to-face check-ins between instructors and students during class time, office hours or scheduled meetings. Instructors would meet with students to review and provide feedback on their research (e.g. articles, annotations, citations) and writing (e.g. outlines, drafts, bibliographies), whether that work was in digital or paper form.

Scrible centralizes all such student work in the cloud and makes it available to instructors from any location. They can access student work remotely to formatively assess it and provide feedback asynchronously within Scrible, thereby eliminating the need for in-person, face-to-face discussions. So, we can help instructors and students continue moving forward with their research and writing despite COVID-19 disruption preventing them from meeting in-person.

WE’RE OFFERING FREE ACCESS TO OUR INDIVIDUAL & INSTITUTIONAL PAID PLANS (EDU PRO) UNTIL JULY 1, 2020, TO HELP INSTRUCTORS AND STUDENTS WHOSE COURSES AND COLLEGES ARE GOING VIRTUAL DUE TO CORONAVIRUS DISRUPTION.

If you’re interested for yourself or your college/university, fill out this form. We’ll respond asap with next steps.

If you have any questions, email us at contact@scrible.com.

Wishing you good health!
-The Scrible Team

March 13, 2020 By Victor Karkar

Helping Teachers and Students Stay Connected During Coronavirus Disruption

We’re offering free access to our paid Teacher Plan until July, 1, 2020, for K12 teachers (and their students) whose school is closing or going virtual due to the coronavirus outbreak.

As schools close or go virtual in response to the coronavirus outbreak, we want to do our part to help teachers and students stay connected and productive. We’re committed to helping them continue teaching and learning outside of their physical classrooms.

Scrible is the most advanced platform ever built to support research and writing. The research and writing process historically involves face-to-face check-ins between teachers and students during class time. Teachers would meet with each student to review and provide feedback on their research (e.g. articles, annotations, citations, etc.) and writing (outlines, drafts, bibliographies, etc.), whether that work was in digital or paper form.

Scrible centralizes all such student work in the cloud and makes it available to teachers from any location. They can access student work remotely to formatively assess it and provide feedback asynchronously within Scrible, thereby eliminating the need for in-person, face-to-face discussions. So, we can help teachers and students continue moving forward with their research and writing despite COVID-19 disruption preventing them from being in school together.

WE’RE OFFERING FREE ACCESS TO OUR PAID TEACHER PLAN (EDU PRO TEACHER PLAN) UNTIL JULY 1, 2020, FOR K12 TEACHERS WHOSE SCHOOL IS CLOSING OR GOING VIRTUAL DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK.

If you’re interested for yourself (e.g. teacher), your school (e.g. librarian or administrator) or your child’s school (e.g. parent), fill out this form to request a free upgrade to Scrible Edu Pro Teacher Plan. We’ll respond asap with your upgrade confirmation (for teachers) or next steps (for librarians, administrators and parents).

If you have any questions, email us at contact@scrible.com.

Wishing you good health and safety!
-The Scrible Team

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.

May 16, 2019 By Victor Karkar

Scrible Overhauls How-to Guides and In-App Tours

We’re excited to announce a major refresh of our How-to Guides and in-app Tours. These are 2 distinct types of self-help and training resources available under the Help menu when you’re signed into your Library.

How-to Guides

Our new How-to Guides replace our previous Scrible Edu Guides, which were a set of PDFs containing screenshots and captions on different topics to help guide you through various aspects of using Scrible Edu such as signing up, installing and using the Scrible Toolbar Chrome Extension, connecting/syncing with Google Classroom, etc. Those guides were launched a year ago and became increasingly outdated with major product updates we made in May and November of 2018.

The new How-to Guides are better because:

New Interfaces. They’re updated to cover those product changes and show our current interfaces.
More Topics. There’s more of them covering more topics. This is an ongoing effort. Our library of How-to Guides will grow over time and cover an increasing number of topics. Let us know what’s missing that you’d like us to cover next.
Bite-Sized. They’re more succinct and focused. Some of the previous PDF Guides were long and covered multiple topics. These new Guides are shorter and easier to digest quickly.
Webpages, not PDFs. They’re built as responsive webpages instead of PDFs. So, their size/layout automatically adjusts to the screen size you’re on. This prevents you from having to constantly zoom in and out if you’re viewing a guide on a phone or tablet.
Personalized to You. The Guides are automatically grouped and shown to you based on who you are and the Plan you’re on so that you see the guides that are most relevant and useful to you. For example, if you’re a student on our free Edu Plan, you’ll be shown the student guides for our Edu Plan. If you’re a teacher, you’ll see How-to Guides (Edu Pro Plan Teachers) under your Help menu. Selecting that will navigate you to a page listing Guides for Edu Pro Teachers, which looks like this:

**How-to Guides Page displaying list of Guides for teachers on the Edu Pro Plan**

From there, you’ll see the list of guides relevant to you and can click on any of them to view the particular guide of interest.

In-App Tours

Our in-app Tours provide in-context guidance to help you understand how to use Scrible while you’re signed into your account. They walk you through key features in different interfaces of our system. Each Tour is presented as a set of steps, with each step highlighting a particular feature and showing explanatory text and, in some cases, a screenshot or animated GIF to clarify how the feature works. For example, if you want to understand how our Outline Editor works, under the Help menu atop your Library, select Tours > Outline Tab Tour.

This’ll navigate you to the Outline Editor in the Outline Tab of your Library and launch the first step of the Tour. In the top left corner, you’ll see the 1/3 in a small green box indicating that you’re on the first step of a 3 step Tour. In any Tour, you can click Next>> or <<Prev to move to the next step or previous step, respectively, in the Tour or Ok, got it to end and exit the Tour.

As with our How-to Guides, this is ongoing effort. Our library of in-app Tours will grow over time and cover more interfaces and features. Let us know what’s missing that you’d like us to cover next.

**Step 2 of 3 of the Outline Tab Tour, which walks you through the Outline Editor**

We’re excited to update these self-help and training resources. Please let us know what you think! We welcome feedback and requests for additional Guides and Tours and even other types of resources!

-The Scrible Team

April 17, 2019 By Victor Karkar

Scrible Announces Teacher Plan

New Scrible Edu Pro Teacher Plan makes Edu Pro features affordably accessible to individual teachers and their students

Image Credit: Google Edu

We’re excited to announce our new Edu Pro Teacher Plan! It’s an affordable annual subscription to Scrible Edu Pro that gives teachers and their students all the power and benefits of Edu Pro. See our Plans Page for feature details and how this new Teacher Plan compares to our other Plans. Here are the highlights (pun intended):

• Assignments for your classes
• Real-time student progress data
• 5 more libraries for you
• 1 more library for each student
• All libraries become sharable
• Annotations preview feature
• Annotation Summary feature
• Annotation Legend feature

• Annotation-level view of library
• 28 more annotation colors
• 5 more annotation styles
• Outline editor for each library
• Savable bibliography for each library
• Support for books and print sources
• 10 more citation source types
• 9,000+ citation styles

Teachers New to Scrible: Automatic Free Trial

When teachers new to Scrible sign up for a free Edu account, they and their students automatically get a free 14 day trial to Edu Pro features. When the trial ends, their accounts return back to our free Edu Plan, but they’ll still be able to access the libraries and sources they created during the trial.

Teachers Already on Scrible: Start Free Trial

If you’re a teacher already on our free Edu Plan, start your free trial of the Teacher Plan from within your account under Settings > Plan > Upgrade Options OR click the red NEW: Try Edu Pro Teacher Plan free message next to the Help menu.

Continuing with Teacher Plan

During or following the free trial, a teacher and their students can continue with Edu Pro features when the teacher subscribes to an annual subscription of the Teacher Plan for only $119.99 USD via our website! This brings the most advanced research and writing platform ever built within reach for teachers and their students without having to convince their entire school or district to buy in!

School/District Purchase Option

An invoicing option is available for schools and districts purchasing 2 or more Edu Pro Teacher subscriptions for $169.99 USD per year per teacher. Limit of 8 per school or 18 per district, beyond which you should consider a Grade, Department, School, District or Campus Plan by contacting us here.

Special Offer

Upgrade from trial to paid subscription this month (April) and get the Teacher Plan through August 1, 2019. That’s 3 months free!

November 12, 2018 By Victor Karkar

ICYMI: 5 Awesome Product Updates from Scrible

In case you missed it, we launched 5 awesome new product updates last month! Each one was substantial and deserves its own blog post. So, the updates are listed here with links to each of the posts:

Scrible Gets Design Upgrade – We launched long overdue updates to improve Scrible’s user interface and user experience. They improve Scrible’s look and feel, layout and navigation and functionality.

Scrible Improves Tagging System – 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.

Scrible Expands Support for Books and Print Sources – We’ve long offered the ability to add books and print sources to your bibliography via the Add Offline Source feature. That’s now replaced with robust new Add Book and Add Print Source options.

Scrible Revamps Google Docs Add-on – We revamped Scrible Writer, our Google Docs Add-on that helps bring your research into the paper you’re writing in Google Docs. It’s now faster and let’s you view/insert your outline and easily view/edit your bibliography.

Scrible Now Supports Co-Teaching – Educators whose school, district or campus subscribes to Scrible Edu Pro can now add co-teachers to their classes.

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

— The Scrible Team

November 12, 2018 By Victor Karkar

Scrible at 2018 Georgia Ed Tech Conference (GaETC)

The Scrible Team was excited to meet teachers, media specialists, instructional coaches, tech coordinators, tech directors and other tech-savvy educators at the 2018 Georgia Ed Tech Conference (GaETC) in Atlanta! GaETC is the major ed tech conference for Georgia. It was our first time there and we were happy to see familiar faces and meet new folks excited to learn about Scrible Edu and try/pilot it!

One of the familiar faces was this Chris Craft from EdTechTeam. He presented these 6(!) sessions:

Top 10 Chrome Extensions Just for Fun
Top 10 Google Drive Add-Ons
OK Google: Exploring the use of the Google Home in the Classroom
Top 10 Chrome Extensions to help Level Up your productivity
Creativity with Chromebooks
Google Tour Builder: Helping stories come alive!

Go Chris!

October 29, 2018 By Victor Karkar

Scrible Wins Classroom Essentials Award

We’re super excited to announce that Scrible’s been awarded the 2019 Classroom Essentials Award for all grade levels by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (IATE)! We deeply appreciate and thank IATE for recognizing our work to support teachers and students with research and writing. Here’s their take on us:

“Scrible provides a comprehensive, seamless integration of technology into the research process, allowing teachers at all levels to analyze student work and to assist students as they write. Scrible allows teachers to oversee the formative process of research writing and creates an online environment where research is cited appropriately and easily while students research. It allows students and teachers to focus on the important skills of exploring and integrating resources and frees them from the stress and chaos of chasing down citations. What’s more, in addition to school-level accounts, Scrible allows individuals to purchase accounts and carry this valuable tool with them into a university or career setting.”

We received the Award at the 2018 IATE Fall Conference in Hoffman Estates, IL, where our Cofounder/CEO was excited to meet and show Scrible Edu to Illinois English teachers. Here are some pics from the Conference:

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