A couple of weeks ago, I read a tweet about a Google Sheets add-on called Essay Metrics, by Oli Trussell. I clicked the link and did a little reading, and quickly realized just how awesome this tool could be. I added it to my Google Sheets and played with it, and confirmed, yep… this is awesome.

This is one of those add-ons that are great for any subject area. Let’s take a look at it and see how it works, and go from there.

First, let’s get the add on. Go to your Google Drive and hit add-ons, then search for Essay Metrics.

Alternatively, click HERE to get to it directly. Once you have it installed, it’s time to play with it.  Now, here is the really great part. You can get data straight from Google Classroom. Try it out and take a look. Click Add-ons, then Essay Metrics, and you see the following screen.

You see that you can add data from a single file, a drive folder, or a Google Classroom assignment. For me, this was the deal maker, as I use Classroom exclusively.  Go ahead and find a file and fill the data. The power of Essay Metrics comes from being able to have data about multiple student essays on one sheet, so I would use a folder or a Classroom assignment to fill this data. When filled, this is what you get.

This is where the power of Essay Metrics comes through. I shrank the columns for student name and email, simply because these are kids we are talking about, and their information is private. Look at your sheet, or mine if you don’t have one.  You have page full of information to start discussions with students. You have word count, average sentence length, ARI (which is the age equivalent of their writing in years)

You can even have Essay Metrics search for keywords and count how many times it was used. This is great for those kids who use certain words far too often.

Overall, Essay Metrics is a great tool for teachers of any subject area where writing is involved. The seamless connection between it and Google Classroom is what makes this, in my opinion, a truly great, teacher-friendly tool for the classroom.

A great YouTube video about Essay Metrics is available HERE. The video is by Oli Trussell, the creator of Essay Metrics.