Category: Education @fi

Varkey Foundation: Holland-based Revisely is one of the 50 most promising EdTech start-ups in the world

23 February 2018

Revisely, the online tool that helps teachers to give better feedback on texts to students, has been selected for the edtech startup competition ‘Tomorrow’ in Dubai. This a new event within the renowned Global Education and Skills Forum. Revisely is in the running to win Next Billion EdTech Prize 2018.

Utrecht, 23 February 2018 – The Global Education and Skills Forum 2018, organized by the Varkey Foundation, is bringing together high-potential educational technology start-ups with Ministers, policymakers, investors, donors, charities and educationalists from around the world. The goal of this event is to meet and discuss how technology can improve the future of education and create more equal chances for all. Within this forum, the new ‘Tomorrow’ event is organized where solutions to tomorrow’s problems are showcased. Revisely is more than happy to be a part of that change!

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The Varkey Foundation
The Varkey Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation established to improve the standards of education for underprivileged children throughout the world. Their mission is that every child should have a good teacher.

Improve education
For over 4 years Revisely has been a successful company, growing to 200,000 users, and we’re still expanding the product and user base thanks to our offering for schools, colleges and universities but also to publishers and resellers. Looking at the global educational situation, we are convinced that our mature platform for feedback on texts can also benefit those students who currently don’t have access to the same education as others. That is why we’ll work on a ‘marketplace’ to match those students with teachers/correctors who can help them improve their texts. Both the commercial and the non-commercial side of Revisely can learn from each other. More importantly, together we can further build on our goal to improve education in the world.

Revisely
Revisely’s team, together with teachers and students of many schools, created a tool that saves teachers time and helps them to provide more qualitative feedback on students’ texts. Revisely is used for all types of subjects, from Biology to Law to English. A large set of positive and critical comments for multiple languages is built into Revisely so that correctors don’t have to type them in again and again. The comments are organised in such a way that students can receive a summary that shows the main improvement points. Students can also dig in to the individual feedback points to learn more about them. Teachers can be the one to set the writing assignment but can then outsource the actual correction work to assistants or external correctors. Therefore, the location of the student and corrector don’t have to be the same. A good example would be a corrector from Birmingham who can give formative feedback to a student in Gambia.

Revisely now available at Utrecht University!

3 November 2017

License agreement
Revisely, the online tool for teachers to give fast, more and better feedback to texts, started a new partnership with one of the biggest universities of the Netherlands, Utrecht University (UU). Since September 2016, UU used Revisely to correct and provide their students’ essays and papers of feedback. After one year of testing and intensive cooperation, UU and Revisely concluded a license agreement for four years.  Teachers at UU can now correct assignments efficiently so students are easily provided with extensive feedback at their work. 

New project to improve students’ writing skills
UU and Revisely also started a new collaboration on a new innovation project on students’ writing skills. The aim of the university is to improve the level of writing skills of graduating students from all different fields of study with a better level of writing skills. Together, the UU and Revisely, will look for ways how the online application tool can contribute to this. This project is expected to roll out later this year.

 

And… we also have something else to celebrate..

Revisely now counts 185.000 users!

Yay!

New: Print texts and feedback

13 August 2017

Correcting texts from students takes a lot of time (and paper). Revisely is an innovative application for correcting texts and providing more insightful feedback to students with various functions Revisely offers. This is possible without having to print, saving lots of paper and ink. However, sometimes it might be useful for teachers and students to print a text and feedback.

How to print a text of Revisely?
Open the text in Revisely that you would like to print. The menu above the webpage shows the option to print when you click on file or archive (depending on the operating system that is running on your computer. A screen will pop up showing the print preview after which you only have to press print. Easy right?

 

 

 

New release: Revisely now a broad tool for all courses at school/university

31 July 2017

Revisely, the online tool for teachers to give fast, more and better feedback to texts, is further improved in its new update. One of the improvements is the new feature to upload texts as a PDF file. It is now possible to use Revisely for all classes and courses at your educational institution.

These new possibilities are of great benefit to schools. Revisely is not only useful anymore for language courses/classes but can be used by the entire school or university. From papers or exams to powerpoint presentations, Revisely is of great use for every assignment. Therefore, more teachers are able to save time and keep overview of the performances. Managers benefit from the reporting tools showing the development of the entire school and students receive richer feedback in multiple courses/subjects. For example, the Peer grading and Team hand-in options of Revisely help students to learn from and with each other in all courses. Additionally, it is beneficial to use Revisely as a  broad tool for all classes/courses since the costs can be shared between different sections at your educational institution.

 

PDF-document upload

The main focus of Revisely was always on language teachers and their correction of texts. When the assignment is handed-in digitally, the student can directly type the text in Revisely itself or copy and paste it from a Word-file.  It worked well, however it wasn’t possible to include any charts or graphics. In order to offer a solution for time-consuming correcting for geography or biology teachers as well, we have extended Revisely with a brand new option. Next to copy-pasting texts into Revisely, it is now also possible to upload the text as a PDF-file.

 

 

The submission page

The texts that are submitted by the students are now easy to be found at the submission page.  Teachers can see at a glance what texts are submitted and which students need to receive a reminder. Teachers are also able to download the original documents that were handed in by the student on this page.

 

 

Extension of sorting options

Expanded sorting options in the list of assignments and texts.

 

Duplicate assignment

Teachers can also duplicate assignments in the new update of Revisely. This saves a lot of time when you created an earlier (similar) assignment in Revisely.

 

Block submissions

Finally, we added a new option what enables the teacher to manually block any future submissions. After choosing this option, you won’t allow any new texts to be submitted.

 

 

Learn more?

Let us know if you would like to have a workshop and/or training for teachers at your school.

Partnering?

Revisely is a good solution to add to an LMS, a digital learning method or to complement a regular educational book. Learn more at our partnering page.

How to use Revisely’s Peer grading effectively in your classroom?

18 April 2017

 

As a teacher, you may use Peer grading in class since it has a lot of value for a variety of learning situations. It can, for example, help your students become better writers, readers, and collaborators. However, it is important to plan the use of Peer grading in order to effectively improve these skills.

Overall, participation in a peer review process can help students:

  • Learn to read carefully, whether it is their own text or of another writer.
  • Improve their writing by taking advice from others into account.
  • Write for a broader audience instead of writing primarily for themselves or for a teacher.
  • Learn to give constructive feedback on a peer’s work
  • Learn how to respond and incorporate comments into the writing process.

A common misstep in approaching Peer grading is to assume that students already master these skills. When asking them to simply review a text it amounts to asking students to apply skills they most likely did not develop yet. Instead, peer grading should be approached as an opportunity to teach the skills mentioned above and for students to practice them. Here are some tips:

 

1. Determine how the Peer grade option of Revisely will fit into the course

Setting out an assignment including the Peer grading option is simple in Revisely but it is smart to prepare such an assignment well. A peer assessment would, for example, works best with texts that are not too long (let’s say 5 pages or less). The longer the text or the more complex criteria, the longer students will take to complete a thorough assessment of their peers.

When assigning shorter texts, you can devote a part of a class to Peer grading or of course, ask the students to complete it outside of class. Next to that, as you are planning the course, it is good to make a list of the skills that students should be learning and how students can practice this while using the Peer grading option in Revisely.

The advantage of using digital peer grading is that, unlike handwriting on a physical draft, online peer assessments allows both students and teachers to give insightful and detailed feedback. Make sure however that you first practice in class how to review and give feedback. This way, students develop comfort when giving and receiving feedback and get to know one another while developing these skills.

 

2. Model and teach the skills required to Peer Grade

Students can benefit from understanding the teacher’s expectations of a peer review. It wouldn’t be very helpful for a student to receive a comment such as “It looks fine to me”.  We want students to be as specific as possible, both about strengths and weaknesses they see in a text. To make sure students know how to give effective feedback, it is a good idea to discuss a sample text. You can write a text in

To make sure students know how to give effective feedback, it is a good idea to discuss a sample text. You can write a text in Revisely as a sample yourself or use a text submitted by a student in an earlier semester. The sample text can thereafter be sent to all students in Revisely or, for example, be projected from your laptop to a projection screen. Ask your students to read it and write some comments about it.

Afterwards, ask your students to work in groups of 3 to 4 people to discuss and possibly produce written comments. Then, ask the groups to present their findings, pointing out strengths as well as elements that need more work. When necessary, ask the students to phrase their comments in more specific ways. Note that while students often hesitate to give feedback face-to-face to their peers, they may actually be very critical when the writer of the text is not present. Therefore, the aim should always be to help them understand that the point of their comments should be in spirit of helpfulness.

 

3. Design a Peer grading worksheet in the assignment to specify tasks

If you want your students to review particular features of a text, make sure that those tasks are clear. Providing worksheets might offer some guidance for them what to look for when revising.  A peer grading worksheet might, for example, begin by asking the reviewer to offer a positive comment about the paper and continue in asking for specific evaluations. Thereby, ask the reviewer to indicate which parts of the text he or she finds most or least effective and why. The student who wrote the text can on his or her turn determine which parts of the paper are effective as it is, and which are unclear, incomplete, or unconvincing. Adding a worksheet to the instructions of your assignment in Revisely can help students to write more extensive comments.

 

4. Teach students how to use feedback from their peers and how to respond to it

Besides learning how to provide others with constructive feedback, it is also important for students to learn how to respond to the received feedback of a peer. Students should weigh and be open to each comment they receive but also realise that they are responsible for the final draft they send you as a teacher. It is their choice whether or not to change the text because of suggested revisions. It is important to practice this in class since comments that suggest radically different revisions may confuse students. Chances are, for example, that students get discouraged of the feedback they got because they expected their paper was finished and wouldn’t need a lot of editing. Therefore, negative response from a peer can be a disappointment resulting in becoming discouraged or even defensive.

Modelling a peer grading session can be a good training in order to develop reviewing skills. Project a sample text to a screen showing a sample text including feedback. Ask the students to put themselves in the position of the writer and to come up with a plan to revise the sample text based on the reviewers’ feedback. Besides, the students could practice evaluating feedback by responding to each comment in writing mentioning their opinion and how they plan to adjust this in the text. Reason of this practice is for students to learn to take their peers’ comments seriously and to think carefully about the choices they have made while writing their texts.

 

5. Reflect on the Peer grading assignment

After students gave their peer review, it is possible for you as a teacher to see those comments in Revisely when you grade the final text. Check if students are writing thoughtful comments that provide an adequate amount of detail. If this is still a problem, spend some more time in class on how to phrase comments in a constructive way. Remember that skills and judgements to effectively manage peer assessments need to be developed since students may have little exposure and experience in doing so.

 

In all, using the new option of peer grading in Revisely offers another way to engage students with the study material. Revisely allows both students and teachers to give insightful and detailed feedback and therefore creates opportunities for learning that traditional grading could never provide.

To learn more about online correction with Revisely and the new Peer grading option, visit our website or just try using it yourself!

Release notes for Revisely version 2.7.2

17 February 2017

It sounds like a small step, but we fixed quite a few things in a new release that is available to all right now. Big shoutout to the UU this time for reporting issues and ideas!

The following issues and bugs have been solved:

  • During correction, in the thumbs up or thumbs down menu search bar, pressing [Enter] key without having selected an existing option, leads to a redirect to the dashboard.
  • After logging in and browsing to any page within Revisely, changing the language with the 3 buttons in the bottom right of the screen, leads to a redirect to the dashboard (for certain users to a dashboard of the Trial school).
  • In the score tab during corrections, any text added will after saving appear without white lines (paragraphs). A new sentence appears instead directly after a full stop.
  • In the dashboard and assignments screens average scores/grades appear. These are not correct. The calculations seem to take in all users, regardless of whether they have a score or have handed in anything.
  • In the assignments screen, after having selected an assignment, a screen with the students’ assignments opens. Per student an Urkund score (%) appears. This percentage differs from the percentage in the Urkund report under ‘plagiarism’.
  • Scores are allegedly visible for students after clicking ‘save to send feedback’, but before clicking on ‘send feedback’. 
  • The wordcounter for students (under the textbox for handing in tekst) and that for teachers (on the page ‘plagiarism’) differs. Because basically every assignment has a maximum amount of words within which students must stay, these numbers must be equal.

The following feature has been added:

  • As a teacher I want to be able to correct in privacy, without students being able to monitor my progress. Therefore, it should be standardised that students do not have a status update during the correcting process.

Keep coming back for our future update where we’ll add the possibility to upload PDF documents, preserving their look and feel, add (formative) feedback and grade them. You’ll still be able to use the time-saving built-in observations that made Revisely so popular with 140,000 students and teachers!

The value of peer grading

12 January 2017

As an educational software development company, we are always thinking about how to improve education. How do we prepare 21st century students for the future world? And how can Revisely, the online correction and feedback tool, support them best within this process?

21st century skills
We believe one of the most important tasks for teachers is to educate critically thinking students. Today we live in an environment full of technology and media with access to endless forms of information. This makes it very important for students to be able to create, evaluate, and effectively utilize information, media, and technology. Students need to be engaged with the study material and teachers need to encourage them to ask questions and argue for their opinions. Receiving valuable feedback in this process is necessary in order to keep on growing and learning.

Peer grading
At Revisely, we want to help teachers to give more insightful feedback to improve a student’s learning. The built-in set of observations in Revisely include tips on how to improve writing skills. By generating all this extra feedback, the student’s learning efficiency is increased. Therefore, we strongly believe in the power of feedback and decided to expand Revisely’s features further with peer grading. Having the importance of the 21st century skills in mind, we want to challenge the traditional view of teachers being the sole feedback givers by letting students partake in giving feedback to each other. Let me tell you about the advantages:

  • More feedback
    By introducing peer grading as a new tool within Revisely’s correction application, students are able to learn from the review process itself and receive more feedback from their peers and teachers. A peer assessment is not solely a process by which peers determine grades for one another. The value lies in the extra amount of feedback and learning from other possible solutions.
  • More knowledge
    In a lot of recent     learning theories is assumed that learning mostly occurs through social interaction. When students evaluate the work of their peers they memorize things better and acquire new knowledge. The reason for this is that when students give feedback themselves, they need to be able to understand the study material and reflect on it. Therefore, students not only learn from viewing the hand-in from their peers point of view, but students also start to understand the material from a teacher’s point of view. Next to that, students can notice strengths in their peers’ work and learn where their own assignment has weaknesses.
  • More engagement
    Having some ownership of the assessment process increases motivation with the subject. In doing so, students might be encouraged to increase their learning. They get a better understanding and insight into their own approach in comparison to that of their peers.

In all, using the new option of peer grading in Revisely offers a way to engage students with the study material. It encourages critical thinking and provides, besides the already built-in comments in Revisely, even more feedback. Learning is not only about acquiring knowledge. It is also about developing competences. Developing abilities in order to succeed in this information age, the so called 21st century skills.

Curious about the new improved version of Revisely and our new peer grading feature?

Read more or just try using it yourself via our website (for free!)

 

Revisely met some very important guests at the Frankfurter Buchmesse!

3 November 2016

‘This is what we share.‘ This was the slogan used by Flanders and the Netherlands who were the guests of honour at the biggest book fair in the world, the Frankfurter Buchmesse. A great opportunity for Revisely and other start-ups to promote innovative Dutch education technologies at home and abroad.

 

The Frankfurter Buchmesse was held from 19 to 23 October 2016. Besides being the biggest book fair, it is also the most important international platform for educative media. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and King Filip of Belgium opened the Dutch-Flemish pavilion. Revisely was present at the pavilion together with the ‘Dutch School’ consisting of 10 different start-ups.  Later that week, Jet Bussemaker, the Dutch minister of Education, Culture and Science, visited our stand where we explained her Revisely’s correction tool.

The five-day event drew more than 275.000 visitors. It was a successful event and great experience for Revisely’s team! Therefore, we hope to see Revisely soon in more and more countries. Will be continued!

Former Minister of Education of the Netherlands (Jo Ritzen) visits Italian school to learn from innovations

9 April 2015

Mr Ritzen will also take the time to see Revisely’s digital correction app in use

The former minister will check out the digital and other innovations at the Majorana school and see how the cooperation proceeds between Dutch startup Revisely and the school, who recently started using Revisely’s digital correction application.

New office?
Revisely is currently investigating to open an office in Puglia to collaborate with more schools in Italy on digital correction innovations.

Digital correction application

Revisely’s app makes it easy for teachers to give good feedback to students. This is especially useful to correct essays more effectively, giving teachers an online tool for text correction in Dutch, English and Spanish (Italian is on the roadmap). Thanks to structured comments, students get better feedback and management benefits from benchmarking tools.

All documents are kept digitally, making it impossible to misplace your text. Also, plagiarism check has been integrated to encourage students’ creativity.

Revisely works hand in hand with teachers and students of the 2 largest school groups in the Netherlands, OMO and Carmel.

In June of 2014 Revisely won access to incubator UtrechtInc, including € 68k growth capital. In December of 2014 Revisely won € 100k financing by European accelerator Impact.

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