Necessity is the mother of invention for sure. While working with a grade 5 class and trying to go through some anchor papers to instruct students on why writing samples are scored the way they are; I got the idea that I could use google docs for this. I created a short writing sample (taken from an anchor paper) in a google doc. I made the sharing permissions open to anyone with the link, but limited their involvement to comments only. I tried it first with some members of my tech team; then tried with a grade 5 group of students. They were able to see all suggestions and comments instead of just listening to someone talk about how they could change it. For some reason, this was engaging to these students. I had them highlight a word or phrase, then from the menu Insert > comment.
The students suggested punctuation, replacements for overused words, subject/verb agreement and many things they often miss in their own writing. I’ll be expanding this for next week, but had great success today!! If you want to see a sample, contact me and I’ll give you the one my team practiced on.
