A resource to help high school students with their digital written productions

Teachers who find that their high school students are having difficulty using digital to write assignments now have one more resource to better support them. The SAMI-PRO platform, which aims to help young people at school, in their professional life and in their personal life, offers a new module for them: written digital production. 

The SAMI-PRO platform is an online personalized learning environment aimed at facilitating the upgrading of basic skills in French and mathematics for students in high school, general and vocational education, as well as adult education. It now contains learning resources to develop students' digital writing skills.

The new component, called PROMÉRIQUE, is the result of several years of collaboration between the Center for Transfer in Educational Success of Quebec (CTREQ) and the public research center SAVIE (Society for Lifelong Learning), associated with the University TELUQ. The management of Polyvalente le Carrefour, the Val-D'Or Vocational Training Center and Kiuna College also collaborated on the project, which received financial support from the Ministry of Economy and Innovation. 

First designed in 2015 to support students with academic difficulties in order to offer them a personalized learning environment to upgrade their basic skills in French and mathematics, the SAMI-PRO platform was then enhanced with help modules to improve students' study strategies. 

Over time, content has been added for planning school work, but also tools to develop strategies for listening, reading, effective written and oral production, to learn how to manage time and study tasks. , to reduce stress and anxiety about school requirements, to improve concentration, memory and comprehension. A job search and labor market integration component is also present on the platform. 

Finally, teachers have access to a real-time dashboard to follow the progress of each student and offer them personalized strategies.

Using digital for written production

After two and a half years of development, a third component was recently added, a set of tools to help with digital written production. "The development of this module was identified as a need when teachers noticed that students had difficulty using technology to write work," explained Louise Sauvé, the researcher associated with the project. 

The new tools therefore aim to enable students to develop skills in written production. These cover the search for relevant information with a view to writing a text up to the writing of the text itself, passing through the analysis of sources.

Thus, several training modules have been developed. Throughout the design work, students and teachers from participating schools were able to experiment and validate the relevance of the resources. 

Among the modules offered are: 

• Effectively search the web
• The right keywords for effective research using online dictionaries
• Online encyclopedias as a source of information
• Write and classify bibliographic records
• transcribe quotes
• Use technologies to improve text writing

The students then have notions to read or listen to (audio or video) as well as exercises to carry out in order to develop their skills. Teachers can track their progress through the modules and even suggest specific activities for certain students. 

The replay of the launch is available on the CTREQ YouTube channel.