Resource: The most dangerous writing app by @maebert

Procrastination, whilst writing, is easy. For teachers and students, it’s easy to get distracted and promise yourself to continue with your writing later on. But ‘later on’ can be thwarted with other tasks that suddenly seem more appealing. But having a motivation to write can help, and there is nothing more motivating than knowing that if you stop writing then all your progress will be lost! That is the premise behind “The most dangerous writing app”, which is a browser based online writing app that deletes your progress should you stop. We know – it did it to us! If you stop for too long, then all progress is lost.

THE MOST DANGEROUS WRITING APP

This is not a serious writing app, of which you want your students to use for essays or project reports, but it is fun for free-writing, brainstorming, or just brain dumping. In a school context, this could be useful to get your students to concentrate on brainstorming or revising concepts taught in a lesson. Just set the timer, and start typing. You are presented with a timer in the top right of the screen, but should you stop for a short while (approximately 5/10 seconds), then it just goes. You cannot get your writing back. As we said, this is not a writing app for serious projects, but in short bursts, the brain dump idea is great just to type away what ever is in your mind.

Ideas for schools:

Challenge your students to summarise what they have learned in a lesson / series of lessons by brain dumping their learning within a specified time. You could do this at the start of a unit of learning, to explore what students understand about a topic (even if they write ‘nothing’ all the way through), and challenge them to write what they know at the end of a topic. You can then see how much they have progressed.
Help improve keyboard skills. Give students a piece of text to type out, and see who can get the furthest within a specified time. Set the time at 5 minutes initially!
Challenge student, or groups of students, to brain storm ideas for any topic. You could also do this yourself when planning a unit of work.

We just hope you don’t see the box we saw below 🙁 Visit The most dangerous writing app by clicking the link above. The app was developed by Manuel Ebert.