Spinuzzi on Paper Commenting in Google Docs
Last Updated on Thursday, 29 December 2011 21:20 Written by Administrator Thursday, 29 December 2011 21:11
At the start of December, Spinuzzi blogged about commenting on students' work in Google Docs. I encourage you to click the link and read the whole post. In short, Spinuzzi found that his students liked his commenting within the Google documents. It allowed for transparency: his students knew when he'd actually completed his commenting on their work. On top of that, as they read the comments, they had a good idea of how their paper was turning out.
From my view, there's an important caveat to making this work: Spinuzzi notes at the top of the paper that he'll provide overall comments on the whole paper once he finishes grading. That explanatory move contextualizes the comments for students while enabling the reader/grader to keep making comments in a transparent manner while still claiming the right to provide overall comments.
While I've considered grading or commenting in GDocs before, I have never followed up. This seems like a viable way to comment so that everyone benefits.
