Product Review of No Red Ink

This platform uses learner self-assessments to construct sentences that pretest, practice, and evaluate learners’ grammatical prowess and acquired learning. The app helps build stronger writers through interest-based curriculums, adaptive exercises, and actionable data. With the authentic assessment feature, learners can rephrase sentences, modify and mark up texts, organize ideas into outlines, and manipulate multi-paragraph documents. The unlimited, adaptive practice feature personalizes instructions to meet each user’s needs and includes support for learners when they get confused. To make learning fun and interesting, lesson content is generated from topics that interest the user, such as popular celebrities, friends, and hobbies.
Website: https://www.noredink.com/
What Users Love About the App
“This site personalizes learning to make review fun. Students are doing to the same content and standards as on other sites, but because they can choose their interests, student motivation multiplies.”
“When COVID-19 transitioned my school into digital learning, I was looking for another website, similar to Quill, that would support my students in their independent grammar development. NoRedInk offers that. It allows the teacher to assign diagnostics and practice that leads to quizzes. It has multiple features that allow the teacher to incorporate a writing assessment in addition to grammar assessment.”
“I really like that I can personalize my instruction. I teach English Language Learners so I like that after the Diagnostic Test, I can choose what lesson the student gets. My students are at different levels, so differentiation is crucial.”
“I love that it tracks each student’s individual growth, this is probably my favorite feature so that I can make sure each student is performing at the level that is right for them. I love that you can cumulative class mastery or each individuals mastery and progress.”
“I love that I can individualize instruction for my students with this program. When a student is struggling on a particular concept, I can adjust No Red Ink to assist him/her. I can also quiz and assign practices. The free version allows you to track most progress of the student.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“It takes a little bit of time for some students to get started initially. Because there are so many options for interests, students like to look at every single one before making a decision.”
“One thing that I don’t like about it is its lack of grammar instruction–though I may be mistaken. It doesn’t seem to provide much assistance or instruction for the activities to the point where my students evidently struggled and received low scores. It doesn’t seem as capable of independent pacing or instruction as Quill.”
“I don’t like that when I entered the students’ name, the system automatically creates a user name which includes the 1st initial and last name, but the 1st initial IS NOT CAPITALIZED. I teach this rule and now the students see that a company doesn’t follow this rule.”
“There have been times when the program has glitched or caused issues as children were using it. There have been typos and spelling errors which have also caused minor problems, all of which were talked through and re-explained.”
“Sometimes I don’t love the way things are organized or quizzed, but for the most part I’ve been able to work around that. There are also certain terms I wish were included, but they are responsive to feedback!”