Everything you need to use Wake Write.Draw.Ap — how to start, what the pen and the paper do, what the app will and will not tell you about a pupil's writing, and how not to lose their work.
For app version 1.0
To keep a copy: use your browser's Print option and choose “Save as PDF”.
This is a writing page. A pupil chooses a sheet of paper, writes on it by hand, edits what they wrote, and keeps or prints the finished piece. It is meant for pupils of about seven to fourteen — old enough to write at length, and at the age when handwriting either becomes fluent or quietly stops improving.
It is a place to write a composition, work through a maths or science problem on squared paper, draw a diagram, or practise letter shapes on guide lines. Nothing more clever than that, and nothing less.
It does not read your child's handwriting. Turning handwriting into typed words properly means sending the child's written work away to another company's computers. No Wake app sends a child's work anywhere, so this one does not either. Instead there is Type it up, where the pupil types their own piece out and chooses a font — see chapter 6.
It does not mark the writing. It records how much was written, when, and with what. It has no opinion about whether the writing is any good, and it does not pretend to. Judging a piece of work stays with you.
It does not send anything anywhere. Every piece of work is on this device only. That is why chapter 10 matters.
Wake Eng.Read.Write.Ap teaches a much younger child their letters, including tracing a letter shape with a finger. This app assumes the letters are already known and gives the pupil a blank page to use them on. They do not overlap.
▲ Back to the contentsAny phone, tablet or computer with a web browser. A tablet with a proper pen is much the best — an iPad with an Apple Pencil, a Samsung with an S-Pen, a Windows tablet with its pen. A phone works, and a finger works, but see chapter 4 before you decide that is good enough.
Press Add a pupil and give a first name, an age and a picture. That is all: no email is asked for, and the pupil goes straight to the paper. While the app is free, nothing else is ever needed.
From then on there is no Save button and there never will be. Every stroke is saved a moment after it is drawn, because a child will close the tab and a phone will run out of battery.
Settings explains how, for both an iPhone and an Android phone. It is worth doing: the app then opens with its own icon and works with no internet at all.
▲ Back to the contentsThe pupil chooses the sheet before every piece of work, and can change it later from ⋯ → Change the paper.
The margin switch draws the red line down the left that an exercise book has. It is on by default.
Age decides only which lines are offered first — every size and every ruling is open to everybody, always. You can change the starting point in Settings.
+ page adds another sheet to the same piece of work, up to thirty. The arrows move between them.
▲ Back to the contentsHandwriting is a grip before it is a shape. A finger cannot teach a grip. If you want this app to improve a child's handwriting rather than only give them somewhere to write, get a rubber-tip stylus, however cheap the tablet — but read Which stylus to buy below first, because the expensive pens are the ones most likely to do nothing at all.
A device can only tell a real pen from a finger when the pen talks to the screen electronically — an Apple Pencil, a Samsung S-Pen, a Windows tablet pen. The soft plastic-tipped styluses sold cheaply in shops do not: to the app they are simply a small finger. They are still easier to hold than a fingertip, so they are still worth having; the app just cannot tell.
Before you spend anything, know this: a touchscreen does not feel pressure, it feels the tiny electric charge in your body. That one fact decides which pens work and which are a waste of money. A stylus works only if its tip carries electricity and there is a path from your fingers, down the barrel, to that tip. It is why a plain rubber cap on a biro does nothing at all, and why the soft grey tip on a proper stylus — which looks like ordinary rubber — does.
An Apple Pencil works on iPads. A Samsung S-Pen works on Samsung devices built for it. A Windows tablet pen works on Windows tablets built for it. Each needs matching electronics inside the screen, so on any other tablet it does nothing whatsoever — and these are the expensive ones. If a shop offers you a pen that charges, or has a button and a small light, it is one of these.
What to ask for in the shop, in these words: “a universal stylus with a rubber tip, one that works on any touchscreen.” No battery, no charging port, no pairing. It costs very little and it will work on any phone or tablet you ever own. Many are sold with a clear plastic disc at one end instead of, or as well as, the rubber — the disc works just as well and lets a child see where the tip is landing.
Beware the two-ended ones. A common cheap stylus has a soft tip at one end and a hard, thin, pen-like tip at the other. That thin end usually does nothing: it is too small for the screen to feel unless the pen has a battery. Nothing is broken — use the soft end. ⋯ → Pen check on the writing page will tell you which end your device can actually feel.
If it makes marks but will not join up a word. This is the commonest complaint, and it is nearly always a tip that is too small or too hard: the screen keeps losing it in the middle of a letter. Three things help, in this order. Hold the pen more upright than a biro — a rubber dome only meets the glass properly when it is straight on. Press a little more firmly, which flattens the dome and gives the screen more to feel. And ask for the fatter tip: the 6mm domes work far better on a cheap tablet than the fine 2mm ones sold for drawing. The app itself now mends the gaps a screen drops, so a word holds together even on a poor tip — but a good tip is still worth having.
To test the idea for nothing: wrap the end of an ordinary pen in kitchen aluminium foil, leave enough foil up the barrel for your fingers to touch it, and dab the tip with a spot of water. It will write. It is crude and it dries out, but it shows a class in two minutes why the screen behaves as it does — and it works if a proper stylus is genuinely out of reach.
Metal wire is the obvious thought, and the instinct is half right. Copper conducts better than a finger does, so the electricity is not the problem. The size of the tip is. A screen does not feel a point; it feels a patch of your body's charge, and it wants that patch about as wide as a small fingertip — 6mm or so. A wire filed to a pen point is a fraction of a millimetre across, so the screen barely notices it, or notices it on and off. Bare metal will also scratch the glass, and that cannot be undone.
So keep the wire and change the tip:
Made that way it writes. It is still not as good as a bought stylus, and it dries out and needs re-damping every few minutes. Be honest with a class about this: a clean finger beats a bad homemade pen, and this app was built so that a finger is never second best.
On a tablet with no pen electronics, which is most tablets, there is one thing to teach: the writing hand cannot rest on the screen, because the screen cannot tell a palm from a stylus. The pupil writes with the hand lifted. Only a device-matched pen removes that.
On the writing page, ⋯ → Pen check opens a white box. Touch it with each end of the pen in turn and it says, in plain words, what the device felt: a pen, a finger, or nothing at all. Nothing at all means the device never noticed that end — usually a fine or hard tip that the screen cannot feel, which is the pen's doing and not the app's. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent anywhere.
A finger writes perfectly well, and nobody who has paid is ever locked out of the app for not owning a pen. The home screen says plainly which of the two this device has seen.
Settings has Only allow a pen — refuse finger writing. It is off until a real pen has actually been used on the device, so it can never lock a family out by accident. Switch it on if you want a pupil to stop reaching for a finger when the pen is across the room.
▲ Back to the contentsAlong the bottom of the writing page:
At the top: ↶ and ↷ undo and redo the last forty things done, and on a computer Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y do the same. ⋯ opens renaming, typing up, printing, sending, rubbing out the whole page, and deleting a page.
✔ Done saves and goes home. A piece of work that was never written on is thrown away rather than left lying about in My work.
▲ Back to the contentsUnder ⋯ → Type it up the pupil can type the same piece out and choose a font and a size. The handwritten page is untouched; this simply gives a tidy printed copy beside it.
This is not a shortcut, and it is not the app reading their writing — the pupil types it themselves. That is deliberate, and it is genuinely useful: reading your own words back is the best way there is to notice a missing full stop, and copying a piece out is how a draft becomes a fair copy.
⋯ → Print or save as PDF lays every page out, one to a sheet, with the typed copy after them, and opens your browser's print window. That same window saves a PDF on a phone as well as on a computer — look for Save as PDF where it asks you to choose a printer.
⋯ → Send this page as a picture hands the current page to whatever your phone can share with — WhatsApp, email, anything. On a computer it saves a picture file instead.
Both of these are how a piece of work leaves this app. Nothing goes anywhere unless a person presses one of them.
▲ Back to the contentsReport on the home screen (behind the grown-up question) gives a printable page covering: how many pieces of work and pages, how long was spent writing, how many days writing happened on, how much of it was done with a real pen, and how many words have been typed up. It lists every piece with its date, and ends with recommendations.
Whether the writing is any good. The app does not read it. A report saying "eleven pieces, forty minutes, all with a pen" is a report about habit, which is a real and useful thing at this age — but it is not a mark, and it must never be read as one. Look at the writing itself; the app only counts.
My writing record is the same information as three charts: minutes written on each of the last fourteen days, how long each piece was, and the split between pen and finger. The fourteen-day chart is the one worth looking at. Ten minutes on four days beats forty minutes on one.
On a class licence, the class dashboard lists every pupil sorted so that whoever has written least, and least recently, is at the top — which is who needs you today.
▲ Back to the contentsNothing, at the moment. This app is new, and it has been put out free while we find out whether pupils actually use it. When you first open it you are offered one thing — Free while it is new — which gives you every kind of paper, up to three pupils, and a whole year. There is no card to give and no payment screen at all.
What happens when that year is up? You will be offered the free year again, or, if we have started charging by then, a plan. Either way nothing you have already written is ever taken away from you. Work stays on your own device and stays yours.
If a price is introduced later, it will be announced on the app's front page well before it happens, and a family already inside a free year keeps it to the end.
Each Wake app is separate from the others. Whatever happens with this one does not change what you pay — or do not pay — for the rest.
▲ Back to the contentsCheck the tool along the bottom is Pen and not Rub out or Move. If Only allow a pen is switched on in Settings and you are using a finger, the app will say so — switch it off there.
That happens when the device cannot see your pen as a pen — see chapter 4. There is no way around it: a device that cannot tell the difference cannot ignore the palm.
Press Bigger. The sheet grows. To move to another part of it, tap ✋ Slide and drag the paper, then tap the pen to write again. Whole page puts it back.
Handwriting takes a lot of room, and a browser gives an app only a few megabytes. Open My work: there is a bar showing how much room is left. Print or send the pieces worth keeping, then delete them — that is what frees the room up. The app warns you well before it runs out.
Make sure the page is open in a real browser (Chrome, or Safari on an iPhone) and not in a preview window inside WhatsApp or Gmail. Those cannot run an app.
▲ Back to the contentsEvery piece of writing lives in this browser on this device, and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded to us. That keeps a child's work private — and it means that clearing your browser, changing phone, or reinstalling will lose the writing itself, which cannot be done again.
This matters more here than in any other Wake app. Losing a chart is a shame. Losing a term's compositions is losing the child's actual work.
Settings → Save a backup writes a file to the device. Email it to yourself and it is safe. It holds the writing itself, so it is a bigger file than the other apps make — that is the point of it. Do this at the end of each term, and before changing phone. To bring it back: Settings → Restore from a backup.
If a pupil already exists on the device, the copy holding more pieces of work wins. Restoring can never quietly lose writing.
A printed page or a saved PDF is a copy that no browser can clear. For a piece of work you would be sorry to lose, that is the safest thing you can do with it.
Settings → Clear the record wipes the charts of when and how much was written and keeps every piece of work. Settings → Erase this pupil removes the child and their writing completely, and cannot be undone — save a backup first if there is any doubt. If the subscription was bought on that child, it goes with them.
Wake Write.Draw.Ap · guide for grown-ups · for app version 1.0. One of the Wake learning apps.
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