Everything new in Mote

Mote for iOS is out of beta and live on the App Store, running on iPad and iPhone. Schools and classes on iPads get the Mote experience too, separate from the Chrome extension. Share a webpage or document with Mote, or scan text straight from a worksheet, and have it read aloud. Or write in Writer, with word prediction built in.

Try it now:

1. Download Mote from the App Store
2. Sign in with Google
3. Open Image Reader and photograph a worksheet
4. Drag the corners to select the part you want read
5. Tap Read Selected Area and follow along
6. Save it to a Collection to come back to later

Mote PDF now runs OCR on scanned and photocopied PDFs — the ones where you try to highlight the text and nothing happens — and accessibilizes them so students can work with them properly. Once it has, the whole toolkit works: Play Page reads the document aloud, the Dictionary looks up any word, Translation handles a passage, and the Screen Mask cuts the glare. Students can highlight, annotate and type straight onto the page, and it all saves into the file so it travels with the work when they hand it back.

Try it now:

1. Go to Google Drive
2. Right-click a scanned PDF
3. Click Open with Mote
4. Click Make readable and choose the document’s language
5. Try highlighting some text
6. Click Play Page to hear it read aloud
7. Save the document so the text sticks

Mote PDF lets you access, edit and view any PDF, then save it back to Google Drive with your changes in it. Use the in-built toolkit to mark it up, or the Mote Sidebar for reading and writing tools. Add the Mote PDF Workspace app and it is one click from any file in Drive.

Try it now:

1. Go to app.mote.com/pdf
2. Drop a PDF file in
3. Click the highlighting tool
4. Highlight some text
5. Click Export and save it to Google Drive
6. Open it from Drive to see your changes

Writing Review finds the spelling, homophone and grammar issues in a student’s writing. It doesn’t fix them, it explains the rule behind each one and leaves the fixing to the student — so they understand the changes they’ve made. Play an explanation aloud and Mote leans on the words being compared, so the difference between their and there is one you can hear.

Try it now:

1. Open a Google Doc with some writing in it
2. Highlight the text you want to review
3. Open the Mote Sidebar and go to Review my writing
4. Click Review my Writing
5. Click I’ll fix it on one of the suggestions, and make the change
6. Click Done — I fixed it to check your correction

In Tap mode nothing appears while a student types — the suggestions stay hidden until they tap the icon below their cursor, so there is no Text Prediction list travelling across the page as they write. Fixed and Follow work as they always have.

Try it now:

1. Open the Mote Sidebar in a Google Doc
2. Click the Text prediction icon
3. Set the mode to Tap
4. Start typing, then tap the icon below your cursor
5. Pick a word

Press Play Page in a Google Doc and Read Aloud now starts from the paragraph your cursor is in, rather than going back to the top every time. Click into the part you want to hear, and that is where it begins.

Try it now:

1. Open a Google Doc
2. Click into the middle of the document
3. Open the Mote Sidebar and go to Reading Mode
4. Click Play Page

All of Mote is now fully translated into French, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. Pick your language once and the whole product follows — the Sidebar, your dashboard, and every button, label and prompt in between.

Try it now:

1. Go to Account Settings at mote.com/account/profile
2. Pick your language from the language selector
3. Open the Mote Sidebar
4. Move through Reading, Writing and Creating modes

Mote’s teacher tools now come with a guided walkthrough. Syd takes you through four lessons on your own dashboard — creating a class, reading your Class Dashboard, setting Student Feature Access, and building a Mote Vocab list — highlighting each step as you go.

Try it now:

1. Go to your Mote dashboard
2. Click Get Started with Mote’s Teacher Tools
3. Pick a lesson
4. Follow the steps

Mote Mastery is now Mote Vocab, in your dashboard under My Vocab. Vocab Lists are editable now: remove a word you don’t want, rewrite a definition that doesn’t fit your class, or add words of your own that the generator missed.

Try it now:

1. Open Mote Vocab from your dashboard under My Vocab
2. Open a list and click the edit button
3. Type the word you want to add, and pick its part of speech
4. Write its definition and an example of how you might use it
5. Click Add word

Assessment Mode pauses Mote’s features for a class while a test or a focused activity is running. Choose how long — 30 minutes, an hour, or through to the end of the day — and choose which features to pause. Then apply it to the whole class, or to everyone except the students whose IEP requires Mote.

Try it now:

1. Go to My Classes and pick a class
2. Click Start assessment
3. Choose how long it should last
4. Choose which features to pause
5. Choose which students it applies to
6. Click Start

Feature Access sits under My School: choose which Mote features are available to students across your school, rather than setting them class by class. Each feature has three states — On, Off for all, and Off by default, which leaves the decision with the teacher rather than taking it away. When something is unavailable, students are told why, and teachers see which admin set it.

Try it now:

1. Go to your Mote dashboard and open My School
2. Open Feature Access
3. Search for a feature
4. Set it to On, Off by default, or Off for all
5. Click Save changes