New in SparkSchool: homework review for handwritten work

What’s new

A lot of homework is still done by hand: a worksheet, a page of working in a maths notebook, a paragraph answer to a science question. Marking a class set takes an evening, and until now, reviewing that work with SparkSchool meant typing it up first.

With this release, students can hand in photos of their handwritten homework from the student portal, and teachers can upload work they collected on paper. SparkSchool reads the handwriting using OCR (optical character recognition), reviews the work and hands you a draft review, so you start marking from a first read rather than a blank page.

How it works

1. Set the homework. Assign the work to your class as usual. Attach a rubric or set the maximum marks so the review matches how you grade.
2. Students upload their pages. In the student portal, students photograph each page and attach it when they hand in. Photos can be PNG, JPEG, WebP or HEIC, and PDFs, Word documents, Google Docs and Slides work too. If you collected the homework on paper, you can upload it yourself.
3. Spark reads the handwriting. When a submission includes a photo, the Read handwriting check runs as part of the review. Spark keeps the student’s line and paragraph breaks and marks anything it genuinely cannot read as [illegible].
4. Spark reviews the work. Using the task and your rubric or marks, it drafts what worked, next steps, suggested rubric scores or marks, and feedback you can edit.
5. You check, adjust and submit. Open the review in the teacher portal, or in the Chrome extension’s grading side panel beside the work. Compare the transcript with the page, change anything you disagree with and submit the score.

Why the transcript comes first

An AI review of handwritten work is only as good as its reading of the handwriting. That is why every review shows the transcript under Handwriting, transcribed. If Spark misread a digit in a calculation or skipped a line, the suggested score will be wrong for the same reason. A quick look at the transcript tells you whether you can rely on the rest of the review.

Marking unreadable words as [illegible] is deliberate. A guess that looks confident is harder to spot than a gap, and a gap tells you exactly where to look on the original page.

Getting good results

• Show students how to photograph their work. Each page straight on, in good light, with the whole page in frame and no shadows across the writing.
• One page, one photo. Separate photos are easier to read than several pages squeezed into one picture.
• Set up the scoring first. A rubric or maximum marks on the assignment gives the review something to score against.
• Check the hard cases yourself. Diagrams, graphs, crossed-out working and very small writing are where transcription is most likely to miss something.
• Make the feedback your own. Edit the draft feedback into your own voice before it reaches the student.

From homework to the next lesson

The point of looking closely at homework is deciding what to teach next. When the reviews point to the same misconception across several students, turn that gap into targeted practice with the remediation worksheet generator, or plan support, core and extension tasks with differentiation and remediation. For the teaching behind this, read our guide to formative assessment and retrieval practice.

Student information and privacy

Uploaded work is stored privately. Only the student who uploaded it and the teacher who owns the class can open it. Photos of student work can include names and other personal details, so include only the student information you are authorised to use and follow your school’s policy on sharing student work with digital tools. SparkSchool does not use your prompts or generated content to train its own models or third-party foundation models. See our trust centre for more detail, and our school AI policy guide for questions to agree as a staff.

Availability

Homework review is available in the teacher and student portals and in the grading side panel of the SparkSchool Chrome extension. Features roll out gradually and can vary by plan and account. Contact our team to confirm availability for your school, or see homework review with OCR for an overview.