About

Write Now!

Write Now! grew from a simple question: How can large lectures feel more like conversations? The platform has been developed around the idea that writing, drawing, coding, comparison and discussion can become central mechanisms through which students think, contribute and learn together, rather than treating classroom activities as occasional interruptions to traditional lectures.

Building on almost a decade of research and development of classroom technologies for introductory statistics and data science education, including the Stats Apps and Quick Write projects, Write Now! has evolved into a lightweight platform for supporting active learning at scale. It enables teachers to quickly create activities, collect student responses, and respond to student thinking in real time.

Write Now! is being developed as an educational research project. The hosted service at write-now.online is intended to make the platform easier to use, evaluate and share.

Early access

The hosted version of Write Now! is currently in early access. Access is currently by invitation only. Invited teachers sign in using the Google account associated with their approved email address. This allows us to:

  • work closely with early adopters;
  • gather feedback on the platform;
  • improve the software before wider release; and
  • ensure we can provide appropriate support during this initial stage.

If you are interested in using Write Now! for teaching, workshops or research, please get in touch. We’d be delighted to hear how you hope to use the platform.

Research project

Write Now! is part of an ongoing programme of research into classroom learning technologies, particularly those that support active learning, writing, discussion, comparison, visual thinking and formative assessment at scale.

The project is led by Anna Fergusson at the University of Auckland, with continuing collaboration from colleagues and educators in New Zealand and internationally. Current core research team members are:

We welcome opportunities to collaborate on research, teaching innovations and new activity designs.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the many teachers, students and collaborators whose ideas, feedback and enthusiasm over the years have helped shape the design and development of Write Now!

In particular, we would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Auckland’s SEED Teaching Innovation Fund, which provided early funding for the projects that ultimately evolved into Write Now!:

  • 2018 SEED Teaching Innovation Grant – Large-scale interactives for large-scale teaching
  • 2019 SEED Teaching Innovation Grant – Go big or go home! Exploring ways to maximise the learning benefits of lectures for students in large-scale statistics and data science courses

We would also like to acknowledge the many opportunities to share, discuss and refine these ideas with colleagues around the world, including the invitation for Anna Fergusson to present this work at the WOMBAT 2024 workshop at Monash University, Developing tools for real-time formative assessment of writing within large introductory statistics and data science courses.

Open source

A standalone version of Write Now! is available as open-source software under the MIT License. It is a static HTML, CSS and JavaScript application that communicates directly with teacher-owned Google Forms and Sheets. It does not require PHP, a database or an application server.

Download the standalone release and read its setup documentation on GitHub.

The standalone release includes separate teacher and student interfaces, example configuration files, setup documentation, and an optional Google Apps Script helper that copies the public Write Now! templates and generates the required local configuration files.

Educators can host the standalone files on a static HTTPS web host and retain control of the Google resources used to store activities and responses. The standalone version has a different data flow and privacy model from the hosted service, so deployers are responsible for reviewing their hosting, Google sharing and institutional privacy requirements.

The application separates its user interface from its data-access components, allowing educators, institutions and developers to adapt the open-source version to use alternative storage systems or develop their own server-based services and integrations.

The server implementation used by the hosted Write Now! service is maintained separately and is not included in the open-source release.