SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ: AMZN) — Today Amazon announced TenMarks Writing, an exciting new online curriculum designed for teachers to help their students become better writers. TenMarks Writing brings to life storytelling and expository writing for students using scaffolding, an instructional technique in which students learn step-by-step how the writing process builds. Additionally, TenMarks Writing also incorporates natural language processing technology to provide students with automatic, personalized feedback and help teachers efficiently deliver differentiated comments as students work through their compositions. TenMarks Writing is available for $4 per student for an entire year and educators can sign up for a free 30-day trial by visiting www.tenmarks.com/writing.
“When teaching writing, it is essential that students receive individual attention in order to be successful, enthusiastic writers,” said Megan Cooley, fifth grade teacher, James P.B. Duffy School, Rochester, N.Y. “TenMarks Writing inspires students to express their thoughts creatively, guiding them through the writing process and freeing up my time to work with students one-on-one.”
TenMarks Writing features include:
- Writing Coach: Using a personalized learning engine that employs natural language processing technology and end-to-end scaffolding, Writing Coach is a digital assistant that guides students throughout the writing process. Writing Coach automatically delivers timely and personalized feedback on things like essay organization, word choice, and more, helping students analyze and think critically about their writing.
- Bursts: To ignite student creativity, TenMarks taps into short writing formats many students are familiar with from mobile apps. With Bursts, students can choose to comment on an interesting picture, create a story around two characters texting each other, and more.
- One-Stop Teacher Resources: TenMarks Writing provides educators with everything they need to teach writing all in one place, from lesson and unit plans, to anchor charts, rubrics, and graphic organizers.
Cathy Barter, a fifth grade teacher at Harold Schnell Elementary in West Carrollton, Ohio, whose students participated in the TenMarks Writing pilot, said, “My students absolutely loved Bursts. When they finished their required work, they wrote entire stories in the text messaging format from Bursts, talking and laughing about how funny their stories were the whole time. They even asked if they could do more writing during recess!”
TenMarks Writing is built on the same award-winning personalized learning engine as TenMarks Math and provides students the opportunity to practice writing in an engaging environment. The launch of TenMarks Writing follows the release of a new study from the American Institutes for Research that examined the impact of TenMarks Math. The findings suggest that TenMarks Math has a compelling impact on student achievement: in classes that completed at least one TenMarks Math assignment per week during the school year, the program improved average math performance by 8 percentile points on state tests.
“We’re passionate about helping teachers personalize learning for their students and believe writing is an important cornerstone of success,” said Meera Vaidyanathan, director of curriculum products, Amazon Education. “We developed TenMarks Writing based on feedback from teachers around the country who told us that they wanted creative ways to help all students build a love of writing.”
To learn more about TenMarks Writing visit www.tenmarks.com/writing.
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