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Make an essay activity in Flint
Make an essay activity in Flint

How to make an essay activity in Flint that acts as a peer editor or practice evaluator, giving students feedback on their writing.

Sami Belhareth avatar
Written by Sami Belhareth
Updated over a month ago

Once the activity is set up with a rubric, the student and tutor will interact, and the activity will grade the student based on the rubric you set. You can always go back and see the student's responses later.

Essay activities allow students to get real-time guidance and feedback from the AI activity when writing a long-form essay, as opposed to chat activities, which function as conversation partners for specific learning tasks.

To create an essay activity:

Click the "Create activity" button on the group page.

Then select to either use our "Feedback on writing" shortcut or create a custom activity.

Add in the activity's objectives.

Under "Objectives", write a a few sentences about who the students are (e.g. 11th grade students) and the writing topic or prompt, what you would like to assess them on. This may require attaching additional materials (click on the paperclip icon to attach materials).

Select "Essay Activity" on the "Activity Type" page.

Flint will automatically generate writing activity ideas based on the content you inputted in the previous step.

Adjust the essay name and description.

The description defines the goals the students will have when working with the activity.

Adjust the activity behavior.

Give the activity a role and rules or guidelines to follow.

Tip💡: Be specific. Give the tutor specific guidelines on what you encourage it to do (e.g. guide the student on providing historically accurate information) and what you want it to not do (e.g. do not provide direct answers or write parts of the essay for the student).

Tip💡: Test out the preview. On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see the preview window. Try typing into the essay window, then highlight a portion of text that you would like feedback on. You should see this in the chat window on the far right, where students can chat with the activity to receive feedback. Remember, the activity still has the entire essay for context.

Use the "Revise" feature

If the tutor isn't behaving as expected, use the "Revise" feature. See this article for more information.

(Optional) Check out the "Language Settings"

There are options to select the primary language, a secondary language (if applicable, see more here), and your input and output method (speaking, text, or both).

If you wish to make an assignment:

(Optional) Decide whether to use "Auto-grading", where the tutor grades the session with the student automatically.

If you would like to use, feel free to use the rubric generated or provide your own. Flint tutors can handle a wide range of inputs, and can usually understand if you copy and paste a rubric from your PDF or Word document into the box.

(Optional) Set assignment settings, such as the group, duration, and deadline, among others.

Share the assignment.

You can invite members directly using the search box. If your visibility is set to "Unlisted" or "Public", you can also share a link to the tutor. And lastly, if the visibility is set to "Public", all members of the group can see the tutor.

Congratulations, you've just made your first activity! 🎉

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