From handwriting to feedback in seven steps.
Seven steps — Class. Assignment. Students. Photo. Review. Marking. Reports. The howay.ai journey, end to end.
The seven steps
Step 1 — Create your class.
The teacher sets up the class in the howay.ai web app — or uses one they have already built. Everything happens in the browser, no app to download. howay.ai is class-aware from the start, so feedback can be tracked over time, per student, per assignment.
Step 2 — Build the assignment.
The teacher builds the assignment in the browser — a creative narrative, a biography, an extended persuasive piece, a recount, a non-chronological report. They select their curriculum (NCfE — National Curriculum for England, the Australian Curriculum, or US Common Core), set their own success criteria, build their marking matrix, and define what good writing looks like for this particular task. howay.ai marks against all of that, never a generic rubric.
Step 3 — Students do the writing.
The students write the piece by hand, in their exercise books, the way they actually write in class. howay.ai is designed around how students experience writing — putting pen to paper, seeing their progress, and owning the work — rather than reshaping that experience to suit the software.
Step 4 — The student photographs the work.
The student takes a photo of their own writing. That bit matters — it makes the student active in the process, not just a recipient of someone else's marking. The teacher can take the photo if needed, but howay.ai is designed for the student to be involved in the cycle from start to finish. Any school device with a camera will do — no typing, no scanning, no app to download.
Step 5 — The student reviews and submits the final draft.
The student takes the photo and reviews it on their school device — a school iPad, a class tablet, or a parent-purchased device the school uses. The interface is built to be student-friendly: clear buttons, simple confirm-or-retake flow, no fiddly settings. They check the photo is clear and the writing reads as intended, then submit their final draft. The moment they submit, howay.ai begins marking automatically.
Step 6 — howay.ai marks the work against the teacher's assignment.
howay.ai reads the handwriting and marks against the teacher's own success criteria, marking matrix, and curriculum framing. The feedback is pedagogy-first: what the student did well, what their clear next step is, written in age-appropriate language. The student receives their personalised report straight away — including the spelling test built from the words in their own writing — so they get their feedback while the work is still fresh. The teacher's judgement stays central throughout: howay.ai supports the teacher's expertise, it does not replace it.
Step 7 — Two reports come out.
The student already has their personalised report from Step 6: what they did well, their clear next step, and a spelling test built from the words in their own writing. The teacher receives a fully editable report for each student — an editable marking matrix and editable comments — plus whole-class analytics drawn from the assignment as a whole. The analytics show how every student performed against the criteria, where the cohort sits overall, who needs focus, who's ready to be stretched, and which students are already using higher-level logic. From that, the teacher can plan next lessons with confidence.
Worked example — a Year 4 narrative writing task
A complete walk-through of one assignment, end to end.
Ms Charlton's setup
Ms Charlton is a Year 4 teacher in the UK. She's teaching narrative writing this term — her class is writing a short story called “The Day the River Spoke.” She opens howay.ai, picks her Year 4 class, and starts a new assignment.
Her curriculum (NCfE — National Curriculum for England) was already selected when she set up the class, so she doesn't pick it again. She sets her own success criteria for this piece: openings that hook the reader, varied sentence structure, accurate use of speech punctuation, and vocabulary that paints a picture. The marking matrix is already in place — it's drawn from the curriculum she selected, so she doesn't need to upload anything. The assignment is ready for her students.
Harvey's submission
Harvey, one of Ms Charlton's students, writes his story by hand in his exercise book over the lesson. When he finishes, he takes the class iPad and photographs his work. He reviews the photo — the writing reads clearly, no glare, no shadow. He spots a sentence he wrote incorrectly, edits it to add a comma, fixes a misspelt word, then submits.
Harvey's report
Within seconds, Harvey's personalised report appears on his screen. It tells him what he did well — a strong opening, a moment of speech punctuation used cleanly. It tells him his clear next step — trying to vary his sentence openers. The report is in language he understands, written for him, not over his head.
Then his spelling test appears, built automatically from the words in the narrative he just submitted. The mechanic is simple: a word from his writing pops up on screen, spelt either correctly or incorrectly, and Harvey chooses which one it is. He gets immediate right-or-wrong feedback, and the next word bubbles up. By the end he has practised the exact words he used in his own story — not a generic list.
Ms Charlton's report
Ms Charlton opens her dashboard. She can see that Harvey has completed his task, along with 19 of her 24 students overall. Harvey's row shows his marking matrix scores against each criterion, an editable narrative comment, and the highlights of his piece. She reviews the report, makes a small change to the narrative section to add her own teacher's voice, and exports the PDF to put in Harvey's book for this extended writing block.
Then Ms Charlton looks at her whole-class analytics. The dashboard groups her students into the categories she'd be making mental notes about anyway: focus groups for those who need consolidation on speech punctuation, stretch tasks for those ready to push on with vocabulary, whole-class teaching points for what everyone got stuck on. She didn't mark any of it herself — but she did all the hard work that came before: the teaching, the development, the time. howay.ai is there to give her the time to go and help them grow further.
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