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What is First Author Writing Software? |
Why You Will Love First Author! |
Who Needs First Author? |
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When your self-contained classrooms shifted from functional life skills to academic skills, you found ways to teach reading. Now initiatives like the Common Core (or your local state standards) are bringing writing back even for your most emergent and non-writers with mild, moderate, and severe disabilities—including autism. First Author helps you make these students—your scribblers and letter tracers—into writers. It does so by taking students through a three-step process: choosing a topic, selecting a picture prompt, and writing with the support of built-in accommodations. |
For Teachers, First Author handles the most time-intensive teacher tasks automatically, making it really easy to use. It allows students to write independently and teachers to support them with instruction. • Word banks and picture prompts are generated automatically • Writing progress is graphed automatically • Accommodations are built in In research trials, First Author improved writing quality and length even for students who were at a "scribbling" stage for years.
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Students with:
• Challenges writing the most basic communications • Mild, moderate, and severe developmental disabilities— including autism • Physical disabilities that make writing difficult
• Teach in self-contained classrooms • Have students with developmental disabilities, including autism • Are teaching Handwriting Without Tears to their middle and high school students |
“Research demonstrates that in order for students with developmental disabilities to develop as writers, writing instruction needs to be embedded in their daily curriculum and must include accommodations using assistive technology (Joseph & Knorad, 2009).” - Sturm, 2012
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Step 1: Type the name of a topic. First Author populates a word bank related to the topic "on-the-fly". |
Step 2: Choose a picture from the automatically-generated choices.
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Step 3: Write to the picture prompt using the word bank and keypad and publish the book! |
Accommodations are built in (multiple on-screen keyboards, single- and two-switch scanning) for students needing additional accessibility. First Author also works seamlessly with Co:Writer for students who need help with grammar, spelling, and reducing keystrokes.
First Author Writing Software helps students write independently, freeing classroom teachers up to focus on instruction. A prerequisite for instruction is knowing where students stand in their writing development. First Author embeds progress monitoring in the tool—making it easy to accomplish this goal.
Writing progress is graphed automatically. Teachers can track individual student progress or compare groups of students.
First Author tracks the following metrics:
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• Letter use per writing • Cumulative letters used across all writings • Total unique words by assignment • Intelligible words by assignment • Text type diversity (teacher logged) |
• Cumulative topic diversity across all writings (teacher logged) • Time on task • Cumulative text type diversity (teacher logged) • Measure of attitude and efficacy (teacher logged) |
First Author guides teachers through the process of scoring student writing samples with the built-in Developmental Writing Scale and text-type diversity measures. Each writing is scored in just seconds. This helps educators identify changes in writing progressions from emergent writing to conventional paragraph writing. Together, the measures paint a picture of where each student stands as a writer and helps inform instruction.
Now that writing is back, how are you planning to bring writing to your special ed classrooms? Make First Author part of your writing plans and help teachers support the diversity of students in their classrooms, while making students into better writers.