What is Pressto? (Oct22 Draft)

October 2 draft -- What is Pressto?

Pressto is an environment that makes writing fun and purposeful for students and time-saving and easier for teachers. In short, it is an entirely new way to approach writing instruction in the digital classroom.

The best way to explain Pressto is to start with what it’s not. Primarily, Pressto is not a word processor. Pressto is not a grammar and spelling checker. Pressto is not a thesaurus, nor is it a dictionary. These are all tools that can be layered on top of a draft of a piece of writing. Focusing student feedback on these elements first is like baking a cake by starting with the icing.

Yet, every writing tool out there for schools is essentially just an add-on to Google Docs, an all encompassing word processor. Google provides a blank canvas with complex features that almost no one needs, especially easily-distracted elementary and middle school students. Math is not taught this way. We don’t give a calculus textbook to students and tell them to ignore all of the pages except those which include addition and subtraction. We don’t start first graders with Moby Dick. Nonetheless, we teach kids to write using the same tool that a modern day Herman Melville would use.

How is Pressto different? We focus on the specific building blocks to whichever type of writing a student is doing: a news article, an essay, a book report,a biography and, later, even a term paper or a college application. Pressto leverages best practices for writing instruction from the decades of teaching before the digital classroom. When modern word processors hit the classroom, educators migrated to how to best utilize these powerful new tools and away from the proven best way to teach writing. Pressto helps students to break a piece of writing into smaller teachable skills and it’s done while maintaining just the right amount of irreverence to keep it fun to use.

Pressto applies technology to automate proven processes. Students, aided by teacher feedback, are taught to build the writing components first and organize and reorganize them into a piece of writing - until it’s ready for the icing.