Blog post for December 4th

Providing online feeback to student writing can be exciting, but can also be challenging. Instead of the traditional red-pen editing marks and margin-sized comments, online editing can be an interactive experience with many people giving feedback in a short period of time, and revisions being made in "real time". My favorite way to provide online feedback to digital writing is by using the wiki. Basic and simple to use, wikis are a great tool for tracking student progress and student thinking. When a student submits a paper to a wiki, it is easy to go into the paper and make comments, suggestions, and changes in a different color font. Then, when the student comes to edit the paper, they can create a copy of the draft and make suggested changes and revisions. This creates a "paper trail" without the actual paper and allows students to track their own writing progress through each assignment. Another valuable tool here is digital recording of audio critique of the paper. Audio recordings could be used in a variety of ways. One way that particularly interests me is in self-editing. Reading something you have written aloud has always been proclaimed to be one of the best tools in revising your own work. But the process that happens when a student does self-editing and revision ends up being nearly invisible, or the teacher has assume the transition of thoughts in the student's head to the changes on the paper (and, let me tell you, sometimes making those assumptions is impossible!). I would like to have a student digitally record him or herself reading the paper aloud to him- or herself, stopping when things seem awkward or they have a desire to change something and making an audio notation of what needs to change and how/where. It would also be valuable to have peers read one another's papers outloud digitally, using the same pause-and-suggest method I described before. This makes editing a much more personal and interactive experience while providing teachers with the ability to track student thinking throughout the process.
Training peers to edit each other's paper is a difficult thing to do whether you are using a pen and paper or digital means. Effective editing is not a tool we emphasize enough from peer-to-peer; many students are afraid of sharing their work in a classroom, allowing others to make marks on their "masterpiece." All of this changes when students realize that digital writing is universally published writing. Instead of one piece of paper floating around with your ideas and another two or three people looking at it, all of a sudden anyone with internet access can look at and evaluate your writing. In order to have students understand this, one technique I would use would be to have students critique what I feel to be a good Facebook page and a poor Facebook page. To begin, I would have students read the "About Me" sections on each page and write a short blurb about who they understand this person to be...not just from what the person wrote, but also from the grammar, spelling, flow, and engagement of the writing. I would have them note the things that led them to these assumptions and what tools worked on the page. Students would also do that with the poor page. In the end, I would stress to students that each person who visits their digital writing is essentially a critic of their work and, in most cases, is able to leave feedback on what they see and/or hear. To wrap of the activity I would give each small group of students an example of bad digital writing and have each group work together to edit the writing; I will then post the good version of the same writing and see the differences and similarities between student revision and the revision that had occurred.