This week my students are finishing up our work on expository writing. Each student has researched an animal and is writing a research report. We've talked about taking notes, webbing, topic and concluding sentences, citing sources and tied in the traits of organization and sentence fluency. Now we are down to the final revisions before publishing them to our classroom website. Throughout the writing process, I have met with students to talk about fix-its and corrections and in the process, we have covered their rough drafts with post-it notes and ink. Having gone this route before, I knew that despite all the notes and conversations their final typed copies would still need work. Enter GoogleDocs :-)
A few years ago my district went "Google" in preparation for going 1:1. All the students k-12 have Google accounts (although only 9-12 is actually 1:1). Needless to say I don't use the tools as efficiently or as effectively as I'd like, but I'm always attempting to find more ways to use them with the kids.
So when it came down to the final stage of this writing project I decided to try making digital comments on the students reports as they shared them with me.
The areas where they need to make corrections are highlighted, so they can go right to the issue and make the change. Once they have corrected things they can resolve the comment and it will go away. They will be responsible for making the corrections I've noted, instead of me acting as their sole editor.
The kids think it is pretty cool to get comments from me this way. Next time I want to try having the peer editing done this way too. That way I can see what types of things they are catching in their own writing.
Well, that's my tried it for this week. What have you tried out lately? Head over to Fourth Grade Flipper to see the other great ideas.
Very cool! I'm trying to use a little more of Google myself. All of my students got Google accounts this year. We have only tried a few things. Thanks for sharing this!
ReplyDeleteAlison
Rockin' and Lovin' Learnin'
I really need to try this. Thank you for sharing!
ReplyDeleteMary
Fit to be Fourth