Google Tools and The Writing Process

Shanna Peeples posted recently about using draftback, a googledocs addon. I had downloaded it and played with is myself, but hadn't looked at what it would tell me about student writing. Today, my friend Cody Ames shared some student docs with me and I was able to play around with the tools with authentic student products.

Here's what I learned:

• This image shows me a graph of the student's writing.
• She opened the doc on Thursday and worked in the top part of the document. Then she didn't so anything much until Wednesday late. 
• On Wednesday, it looks like she drafted most of her paper and finished it on Thursday. 
• I can see that she worked at home on Thursday night for 12 minutes and the next Thursday for 28 minutes. She worked again on Friday night for 15 minutes.
• I can also see which users were in her doc and how many revisions each person made to the doc. 
• The blue highlights show how long the document is over time. This also compares directly to the gray bars at the bottom - I can see that the document gets longer over time, but that the writer added a significant portion at the last of her writing session just before the conclusion - which is another piece of evidence that she used revision. 

• This image shows a static picture of the video draftback makes for the revisions. You can see the document being written! You can speed it up or slow it down to see what the writer is doing. 
• I learned that on the first day, the 16th, the writer just went in and deleted the prepopulated form the teacher had created to preserve MLA format. 
• I can see where she was drafting, and then switched to revision, and followed with editing. 
• I can see where she pauses to think or take a break. 

• Google Docs also has a feature that tracks changes like Word. You click on File. Then on the dropdown menu, you select revision history. A new tab will open and you can click on the green boxes to the right to see each revision. 
•   You can see in this example that she made revisions on Feb 16, Feb 23, and Feb 24.
•    It looks like the major revisions and editing changes were made on Feb 24, while the 16^th and 23 look more like she was still drafting.
• The earlier the revisions were noted in the stream for the 24th, the more she focused on elaboration.
•  The closer to the end of her session on the 24^th, she focused on edits like punctuation and spelling (shrift, : ).
• The 16^th is pretty fun to look at as it starts out with a pre-populated form that preserves the MLA formatting required for the course.
• Also, when you hover over the revisions, you can see WHO made the revisions. If someone else was sharing the document and making comments, you could see that too. 

• After clicking on the green square, you can scroll up and down on the essay and see images like the one below. Be sure to check out the second one. It's funny. 
• You can also upload a Word document with track changes selected. The track changes options will turn into google doc suggestions that can be accepted or rejected. Read more here. 

a.

b.

Notice that there is no concluding paragraph to this essay. What more is there to say? Just stop already.