New Features

September 16, 2021 By scrible

Scrible Launches Revamped Assignment Management System

Educators, we’re excited to announce our new and revamped assignment features! Based on feedback from you over the years, we’ve completely overhauled and redesigned how Scrible assignments work from the ground up.

Easier Navigation

Assignments are now more visible by being in the top navigation bar of the website when you’re signed in.

**Assignments are now available directly in the top navigation bar**

Overview: How Assignments Work

When you create and distribute (i.e. assign) a Scrible assignment, we create a special Assignment Library for each student that houses their work for that particular assignment. You can access the work done in these assignment libraries at any time to see how your students are progressing and provide formative feedback. You can set requirements for various aspects of an assignment to create measurable goals for your students. Class-level and student-level progress toward the goals is summarized in an assignment dashboard.

Assignment Distribution Options

We redesigned how you distribute (i.e. assign) assignments to students to give you more options/flexibility.

Distribute via Class/Section

You can distribute an assignment to your classes if you’ve imported/synced them from elsewhere (e.g. Google Classroom) or manually created them within Scrible. If you teach multiple sections of the same class, you can now easily create a copy of the assignment for each section of the class.

Distribute via URL/Code

Don’t have your classes in Scrible? Want to distribute an assignment outside of a class? We now offer the ability to create a URL and code for the assignment that you can share with students. When they follow the link and sign into their account, they’ll be added to the assignment automatically. Alternatively, they can also enter the code on the Assignments Page in their accounts to join the assignment.

**Updated assignment distribution options**

Google Classroom Assignment Sync

If you’ve synced your class from Google Classroom, you can now also sync your assignment so that it appears as an Assignment in the Classwork tab of Google Classroom. If you enable this Google Classroom Assignment Sync, students can access the assignment from there and must submit it from there.

**Scrible assignment within Google Classroom**

Customizable and Changeable Assignments

Previously, you had to choose among 3 specific assignment types (annotated bibliography, research project and research paper), each with its own features. Now, there is a single, base assignment that you can easily configure to meet your needs. You choose which specific Assignment Options and Requirements (described below) to enable/disable based on your teaching and learning goals, thus enabling more flexible assignment design.

Furthermore, you can adjust the options and requirements as the assignment progresses, even after students have started working on it. For example, if you decide to add a writing component to an existing research project, you can simply enable the paper features mid-way through the assignment and students will instantly see the Papers Tab in their assignment library. So, you can update an assignment’s configuration anytime.

This real-time adjustability means you can also expose just the right features to students at just the right time to prevent them from potentially being districted early-on by features they won’t need until later in the process. It also means you can pace and stage-gate student work so that students don’t move onto the next step too early. For example, if you want to review and approve their sources in week 1 before they start their outlines in week 2, you can disable the outline feature until week 2, thus preventing them from creating outlines using bad sources.

Bottom line? You now have more options and greater control when managing assignments!

Assignment Options and Requirements

The options to customize an assignment appear in the Sources Tab, Bibliography Tab, Outline Tab and Paper Tab, all of which appear under the Options and Requirements Tab. Let’s now look at each one of these separately.

Sources

Assignments typically involve information sources (a.k.a. “sources”). For example, a paper assignment will require a set of curated articles with annotated evidence to support arguments made in the paper. You can provide students with sources or require them to curate their own sources within the assignment library.

To include sources for students, you can select sources from your own libraries to add to the assignment. These will be copied to each student’s assignment library and will include any annotations you made on the sources. So, you could highlight noteworthy passages of articles or add comment annotations containing questions you want your students to answer.

Alternatively, you can include bookmarks for sites that you recommend your students use such as specific subscription databases available to your school.

You can also set a requirement for how many sources students need for the assignment. If you set a source count requirement, the assignment dashboard will show a graph displaying each student’s progress towards that goal, along with additional metrics regarding the types of sources they curated (e.g. database article, news article, print source, etc.).

**Assignment configuration options under the Sources Tab**

Bibliography

If your assignment doesn’t require a bibliography, you can disable the bibliography and citation features completely and your students won’t see the Bibliography Tab in their assignment library. If the features are enabled, you can specify the required citation style (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago) and control additional features such as specifying whether to use an annotated bibliography and/or split bibliography (e.g. for National History Day projects).

You can set the required number of sources your students should have in the bibliography. If you choose to use an annotated bibliography, you can also specify the number of words your students must write in the citation annotation for each source. Note: we call these citation annotations to avoid confusion with annotations such as highlights, comments, etc. Additional metrics will be shown in the assignment dashboard to show progress towards these goals.

**Assignment configuration options under the Bibliography Tab**

Outline

If your assignment doesn’t require an outline, you can disable the outline features and the students won’t see the Outline Tab in their assignment library. We’ll be adding additional options here later.

Papers

If your assignment doesn’t require a paper, you can disable the paper features and students won’t see the Papers Tab in their assignment library. If you enable them, you can also create the document for them to write in for the assignment. This can be a new blank document, or you can select an existing doc from Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive to use as a template. Each student will receive their own copy of the document to work in.

You can specify a word count requirement for the paper, which will display a metric in the assignment dashboard tracking student progress toward the word count goal.

New Feedback System

Assignments now have a built-in feedback system in the form of threaded discussions in a new Feedback Sidebar, which you’ll see on the Assignment Review Page and your students will see on their Assignment Page for an assignment. You and your students can post new messages to initiate topics of discussion. You can provide feedback and students can request feedback or clarifications on various aspects of an assignment. You and they can reply to one another. Once the discussion is complete, you or they can mark it as resolved to minimize and move it to the bottom of the Sidebar. All resolved discussions are preserved and can be marked unresolved to move them back up for continued discussion.

Moving feedback to this new Feedback Sidebar yielded a new layout for the Assignment Review Page that now provides you with more space to view/review student work to the left of the Sidebar.

Assignment Management Example

Let’s consider a research paper assignment. Let’s say you want to focus your students first on collecting sources and finding important facts. So, you create the assignment and disable the bibliography and citation, outline and paper features so your students don’t get ahead of themselves or distracted by the corresponding tabs in their assignment library.

For younger or inexperienced students, you might not want them to search for sources. So, you include sources in the assignment that you’ve previously curated as the starting point for their research. As a result, they can just focus on annotating those sources to find the facts they’ll need.

When the class is ready to move on, you can adjust the assignment to enable the bibliography and citation and outline features. The corresponding Bibliography Tab and Outline Tab will then become available in your students’ assignment library so they can start creating their outlines and bibliographies.

When the class is ready to start writing the paper, you can adjust the assignment to enable the paper feature and create a paper using an existing Google doc as a template, with each student receiving their own copy of the template.

Legacy Assignments

Already created an assignment this semester? It’s still available via the Legacy Assignments section link at the bottom of the new Assignments Page.

Have Questions?

See our new help guides that cover this new assignment management system in detail.

If you still have any questions or suggestions for improvement, including new features requests, please let us know!

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 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

May 14, 2018 By Victor Karkar

Scrible Launches Outlining, Annotation Tagging and New Libraries Interface

NOTE: New Library Layout applies to all Scrible users, but all other changes apply only to Scrible Edu Pro users.

Out with the old and in with the new! We’ve made major changes to make our Library interface more intuitive, with a better design and layout. We’ve also added powerful new features. Check out our new transition video above to guide you through the changes!

OVERVIEW
Previously, navigating between separate Libraries and the components of a project (i.e. its Library, Bibliography, Legend, Collaborators, etc.) required too many clicks. Based on your feedback, we’ve eliminated much of that and simplified the layout and navigation of Libraries and project components. We took the opportunity to also make other improvements to Libraries. Details are below, but here’s a summary of the changes:

Library Improvements
• Standardized Libraries – All libraries have all of the same features now.
• New Library Layout – The Library fills more of the page, is less boxy, has new/updated buttons and more.
• Projects → Libraries – The Library (vs. a Project) is once again the main, top-level organizing concept.
• Project Dashboard → Library Tabs – Panels in the old Project Dashboard are now tabs atop the Library.
• Projects Page → Libraries List – You now have a Libraries List at the left vs. a separate page of projects.
• Class Library Changes – Class Libraries are no longer special things. You can add classes to any library.
• Annotations List – Click on a source (article) in your library to see a list of annotations for that source.

We’ve also added awesome new features! Again, details are below, but here’s the summary:

New Features
• Annotation Tagging – Organize (tag) your evidence/comments (annotations), not just sources (articles).
• Annotations Tab – View and full-text search your annotations in a new Annotations Tab in the Library.
• Smart Outline – Drag/drop annotations into an outline. It auto numbers and updates your bibliography!

DETAILS

Library Improvements

Standardized Libraries

Previously, My Library lacked some features available in other libraries. Now, libraries are standardized so that all libraries have all the same features. That simplifies things!

New Library Layout

The new Library layout wastes less space since it fills more of the page. It’s also less boxy, with a more modern, continuous layout. It also looks and feels more like a robust desktop application. Nice!

Projects → Libraries

The library (vs. project) is once again the central organizing concept. So, there’s no longer a Projects Tab at the top. The contents of that tab have been absorbed into the new Libraries Tab, which now encompasses all components of a project.

Project Dashboard → Library Tabs

The always visible Library Tabs now provide easy access to the various components of a project (e.g. Bibliography, Legend, Papers) that were previously displayed as panels in the previous (now defunct) Project Dashboard. The old Collaborators Panel is now the Collaborators Tab under Library Settings. Library Settings are accessible via the new gear icon to the right of the library name. Use this to invite/add collaborators to your library.

Projects Page → Libraries List

The Libraries Nub to the left of the library name can be toggled to show/hide the Libraries List, which serves the same purpose as the previous (now defunct) Projects Page. The Libraries List displays all of your libraries, including libraries you own and shared with others as well as libraries others have shared with you. The previous concept of a Project Library is now just a library in this Libraries List. So now, just treat, designate and think of each such library as a separate project.

You can now easily move a source (e.g. article) from the library you’re currently viewing to another one simply by dragging and dropping it to that destination library’s name in the Libraries List. So easy!

Class Library Changes

Since this Libraries List is comprehensive, we’ve done away with the concept of a separate/special Class Library, which previously appeared in the Libraries Tab (now gone) under the top-level Classroom Tab. A Class Library was autogenerated every time you created a class. Instead, now, you can just add a class to any library and it becomes a class library. Magic!

Like before, you can still manage the permissions that a class has for a library.

Annotations List

A new Annotations List feature allows you to see all annotations for a selected source (e.g. article) in the library. Click the arrow at the right end of a source in the Sources Tab of a library to browse its annotations. That slides out the Annotations List from the right, which lists the annotations for that source. From there, you can share an annotation, manage its tags, view it in full form in the Library and open the source (e.g. article) to view the annotation in its original context.

New Features

Annotation Tagging

You can now tag specific annotations (e.g. highlighted evidence and comments), not just sources (e.g. articles). When you’ve annotated a source (e.g. a webpage or PDF), you can tag the annotations right then and there. For highlights, underlines and other text style annotations, click on the annotation to view its Annotation Context Menu and then click the tag icon in the Menu. For comments, just click the tag icon shown below the timestamp in the title area of the comment.

This brings up the Annotation Tags Window, which you can use to add and remove tags for the selected annotation.

Tags applied to annotations roll up to the encompassing source. So, in the example shown here, where the tag Report, is added to the pink highlight in the article titled, ‘Millions missing out’: aid fails…, viewing the article in the Library later shows the same tag applied to the article as a whole.

Annotations Tab

Under the new Annotations Tab in the Library, you can view, browse, full-text search, tag and filter all of your annotations across all sources in your library. This gives you more granularity in organizing your information… at the evidence and comment (i.e. annotation) level and not just at the article (i.e. source) level.

Smart Outline

Our new Smart Outline appears under the Outline Tab in the Library. Here, your sources and annotations are accessible via the Library Sidebar on the right hand side. Click on the arrow at the right edge of a source to dig a level deeper and browse its annotations. Alternatively, use the search field to search the library for relevant annotations.

In either case, once annotations are visible in the Library Sidebar, you can drag them leftward and drop them into the body of the outline. Each added item’s corresponding source is automagically added to your bibliography and the corresponding inline parenthetical citation is shown below the item in the outline (not illustrated here).

Each added item is automatically numbered according to its location in the outline hierarchy. Hovering over any item displays icons to the left allowing you to delete the item, add a subsequent item at the same level, indent/outdent the item or drag it to another location in the outline. If you drag it, you’ll see a preview of its new number as it’s being dragged. Whether you indent, outdent or drag and drop an item, its number in the outline is automatically updated. Sweet!

You can edit/tweak the item’s text as needed. You can also just type your own thoughts into the field for an item in the outline. The outline can later be copied and pasted into a document.

So that’s the new Scrible! You can always refer to the video above to see the changes and new features in action. We’ll be updating our training and support materials to reflect them. If you like the new stuff or if you stumble upon any problems or have any questions, please let us know! We’re always here to help!

– The Scrible Team