Before you take essaypop out “into the wild”, we would urge you first guide your students through these four lessons that will allow everybody to try out many of the features that essaypop has to offer.

If you have not yet created your classes or onboarded your students, it would be best to take care of this now. Here's a link to an article that shows you how.

And if you ever need help or want to dig deeper, our Help Center and YouTube channel are at your fingertips.

We start things simple with a simple quickwrite, then move into two structured, short-response writing activities (the second one will be a timed task). The training set culminates with a persuasive, multiple-paragraph essay. Please carefully follow the instructions for each lesson so that you and your students don’t miss out on the opportunity to use all of the cool features that essaypop has to offer. Each lesson is also accompanied by useful resources that you can peruse and even share with your students.

This is a very enjoyable set of activities that you and your students will find compelling and engaging. Let's jump right in!

In this lesson, students will spin a quick narrative about what would happen if they spotted their exact double in a crowd. Students will compose their thoughts in a single frame and then interact in the collaborative Hive environment. Using the assessment tool, the teacher will assign a holistic, rubric-based score for each student. The rubric categories are the use of evidence, the quality of analysis, organization, and/or grammar and mechanics.

Take a minute to watch this video with your students as it provides a great overview of how the Hive works.

In this lesson, students will compose a short-response essay (also known as a power paragraph) in which they respond to a short, classic poem by Theodore Roethke. When students are ready to write, they will first complete a simple prewriting activity using our Post-it-style brainstorming tool.

They will then write their short responses by composing an engaging hook, a thesis or claim, by presenting evidence, and then commenting on or analyzing the evidence presented. They will conclude the response with a closing statement. Using the assessment tool, the teacher will select and score two elements of the paragraph, thesis, and analysis, based on rubric descriptors.

Here's a solid article you can share with your students about tackling what we call a "power paragraph"

Take a minute to watch this video with your students as it provides a great overview of how frame writing works.

Some students will actually be ready for more complexity, and if they are, here's a great video that shows them how to take their paragraph to the next level.

In this lesson, students will write an expository short response based on an article that discusses how to deal with failure. Like the previous lesson, they will compose responses with an engaging hook and a thesis or claim; they will present evidence from the text, and then comment on or analyze the evidence presented. They will conclude the response with a closing statement.

This is also a timed-writing activity, and the timer will be set by the teacher in the essay dashboard.

In this lesson, students will compose four or five-paragraph essays that include the traditional, academic components - introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Feel free to read, present, and discuss the literature with your students as you normally would. When students are ready to write, they will first complete a prewriting activity and answer several guiding questions using the Post-it-style brainstorming tool.

They will then write their essays using the structures provided in essaypop. Using the assessment feature, the teacher will select and score two or more elements of the essay based on rubric descriptors available in the assessment tool.

Before you begin, you may want to go over this article with your students as it does go into detail about writing multiple-paragraph essays using essaypop.

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Now that you have finished the training set, you should have some solid familiarity with the essaypop system. If you enjoyed and your students enjoyed this set, there are others in our library that you can choose from. To take a deeper dive into the essaypop writing platform here's a great article to peruse called The Essaypop Essentials.