Google docs as a peer review system

Learning/Teaching situation

To apply peer review among students.

Target group

Teachers who want to apply peer review among their students.

Description

Peer Review, is the process by which students provide one another evaluative and constructive feedback, can be a powerful tool for instructors to employ authentic, engaging assessment in online learning. When implemented effectively, peer review can teach your students the valuable skills of evaluation and assessment. These skills, when fostered in your online classroom, can enable students to better their own work based on the feedback of their peers.

One of the best features of Google Docs is the collaboration feature. Students can use
this feature to edit each other’s writing and engage in the peer review process.

Some ideas for using the collaboration feature include the following:
• Collaborative book reports
• Peer editing
• Collaborative creative writing

Teachers can use the collaboration feature to monitor students’ progress. This tool facilitates teacher comments on student essays. No more waiting until students turn in their essay. Check essays online and even make suggestions for revisions to drive successful, proofread projects from early on. When students finally print out their work, they will have been proof readed.

How to do it (step by step)

Step 1

 Once in Google Docs, select the Share tab in the upper right-hand corner. Students can invite their writing buddy or buddies to be collaborators, by simply entering their email addresses and clicking “Invite Collaborators.” Make sure they also invite you, the teacher, so that you can monitor their progress and provide feedback along the way  ambitious. We believe a full learning analytics solution will help us not only predict events but change them to be more positive.

Step 2

After students are entered as collaborators and after they collaborate, the following screen will be visible.Notice that each collaborator will have a different colour to distinguish what they contributed to the document.

Step 3

As your students revise a document, the revision screen will show who worked on the document and when they worked on it. When two students edit an essay, you can easily see who did what by comparing two revisions or browsing through the revisions.

Step 4

When your student is ready to print, he or she should click on the “Print” link. Notice that none of the comments or edits appear when the essay is printed.

There is more…

To help identify students easily, ask them to change their display name to Last Name, First Name. Otherwise, you will have to figure out who is who with names like “hellangel4.”

To get students really excited about their work, tell them you are going to publish it on the web. Whether they have two readers or 1,000 readers, they will work harder on their article because they know there is a real audience out there. Publishing from Docs is easy. Just click on the Publish button.

Then copy the URL and paste it into an email or Web page to link to the article on
Google Docs.

See Also

Google Docs training and help