There are few possibilities to look on the way school children (an in general all people) write. Teachers, researchers, practitioners and ethnographers can embark on trying to deconstruct the writing processes of a text committed to a piece of paper by inferring why the child erased or marked some words, or by means of other  – all subjective – techniques. They could stick to the child while writing and play an – exhaustive and very time consuming – over the shoulder couching approach. More technology-driven approaches could be adopted as well, but the current technology at reach, such as a conventional word processor tracking changes option or the use of video devices to record a writing session, do not allow researchers to explore the writing process with the detail or time efficiency desired.

The Digital Tool “El Espía 2.0” is a web-based word-processor-like tool that allows researchers to «spy» on a child writing session enabling the visual reconstruction of the text production process.