Help Your Students Learn From Their Mistakes With Antidote

“Why is this a mistake?” We bet you often get this question from your students in response to corrections you’ve made to their work. The classroom is absolutely the place to provide the answer to this question along with a quick grammar lesson, but your students can also develop the autonomy they need to correct their own mistakes and learn from them. This is where Antidote comes into play by providing clear and relevant explanations.

Explanatory Tooltips

Antidote is much more than just a spelling and grammar checker. It consists of three main tools: a powerful corrector, rich dictionaries and detailed language guides. Each has been carefully designed to work in conjunction with the others. As a result, students get quick access to reliable language resources when they use the application.

When Antidote detects a potential error in a text, it underlines the offending word. By clicking the detection, students will see an explanatory tooltip that provides the essentials for understanding the corrector’s detection at a glance.

The tooltips act as a bridge between the corrector and the language guides. They bring the guides straight to you, right from the corrector window. With the click of a link, you can learn even more and gain a deeper understanding of the issue at hand.

Context-Sensitive Guides

Encourage your students to click the tooltip title in orange—the signature colour of language guides. The link leads directly to the corresponding article in the guides. Students can refer to it for a detailed explanation of the rule they need to understand… or learn about its exceptions! Incentivize the use of this shortcut as a way for them to expand their knowledge.

Beyond grammar, the language guides cover all aspects of writing, from syntax and style to punctuation and spelling.

The guide articles go further than simply describing grammar rules. The explanations are clear and concise, making them easy to understand and remember. They describe exceptions and provide practical examples of how to apply the rule in different contexts. They also include useful tips or advice on how to avoid certain pitfalls.

Learning Better by Understanding

It’s a common misconception that the corrector does all the work with just a click. Your students do the real work, not the corrector! It merely flags potential errors according to grammar rules and the overall meaning of the sentence. Your students need to understand the proposed correction before they apply it. This way they have full control of their work. Use the tooltips as a way of getting your students to reflect on the corrector’s explanation and to consult the language guides to learn more about what it was that triggered the detection.

Adding Articles to a List of Favourites

Is there an article you find particularly interesting? Does it deal with a common mistake or provide a useful list of exceptions to a rule? Get your students to add the article to their favourites by clicking the icon to the right of the search bar. That way it’s always on hand when needed, and they won’t need to look it up every time they want to refer to it. What better way to help your students build their knowledge of the language and reinforce their understanding of its rules?

You can also create personalized lists of guide articles, as you would lists of words in the dictionaries, and share them with your class as a study aid.

The language guides are aptly named: they are designed to guide students to relevant information and support their language learning. By getting into the habit of using these tools, your students will make more informed decisions about how they should correct their writing, and they’ll become more independent over time as they learn from their mistakes.

Don’t already have access to the Antidote product line? Interested in discovering its three writing assistance applications or in making them available at your school?
Try it out for free or request a quote for your organization.