Technology provides the best writing help in addition to some summative responses throughout the learning procedure. In both Office 365 and Google Docs, the teachers can leave some comments on the work assigned to their students work while they are doing it. Before submitting their work, they can be fully aware of their mistakes and can identify and clear them as soon as possible. This technique helps fix errors, continue the mental growth, and build on their abilities and strengths, whether it is a few quick words or the teacher’s comments, to get the best results.
However, a few points can be kept in mind to follow them and get better results.
- Attention to audience
- Collaborative growth
- Revise and track changes
- Share resources
- Picture this
Attention to audience
When the students write for their educators, the learning finishes when they turn them into an assignment where they give them feedback on their work and return it with some remarks for their learning and understanding for their betterment. An audience of class, peers, or school can give better feedbacks than anyone can ever give. For instance, use a community tool such as Edmodo, Google Classroom’s stream, or Twitter for providing the students a platform for reading and responding to everyone’s ideas and writing style. Therefore, teach the students to provide constructive feedback, strong enough to increase the input exponentially. Also, the students can help their peers with the formative feedback process, routine comments to spend more time, and reduce the time that the teachers need to finish making it simple to provide more meaningful feedback.
Collaborative growth
Teachers can also use cloud-based tools for providing ongoing support during the writing process. Formative assessment tools such as Socrative and Pear Deck help the students to share their writing without mentioning their names for the class or the teachers to review it. Students can submit anything from a thesis to one paragraph only to share it without the pressure of signing their names into the work. Although the fellows’ written feedback and the trainer matters, the discussion procedure helps the student dive into the growth process. Sharing the students’ models and examples with the formative tool or even the shared document can help the students learn from them and grow together.
Revise and track changes
In the case of improvement in the students’ performance, the teacher needs to understand their growth. Both Office 365 and G Suit, and most of the apps from tech giants, revisions, and track changes. When the teachers can see these revisions, one can see the learning growth and progress. It is not only for the betterment of the students, but everyone can understand how and why. Add in some data-collection tool or a Google Form to have the students reflect on their understanding and progress.
Share resources
Sometimes the students need more help or immediate guidance or assistance than peers or teachers. Writing is not an easy task, yet technology provides unlimited resources to help learners. Consider sharing articles, videos, or tutorials with the students to help them eliminate common challenges, better understand grammatical rules and tactics, and deal with their writing struggles. Whether you make your own or curate from sites such as Purdue’s Online Writing Lab, Khan Academy, and YouTube, you can give the students more options to learn and curate more.
Picture this
Now think about this, the students have turned in a recent writing task, and you know that they were successful as you commented and read along the way. A few comments and a quick skim helped everyone perform better than before.
Writing tools
Digital methodologies have changed the way of our socialization, working, sharing knowledge, and communication. However, the medium has changed, that the fundamental skills are required to be the same well. Tools are there to help the process get more streamlined; however, the excellent teaching and feedback need remains the same.
Here are some of the writing tech tools for you to understand
- Fundamentals: the procedural section of writing has changed in the past years, and the software’s ability to catch the fundamental errors has too. Grammar checking, spelling checking, and plagiarism detection have all become quicker and adequate.
- Prompts and rubrics: making a good rubric from scratch is a lot of work; however, a thorough rubric is one of the primary keys to success for anyone if they intend to learn some new skills.
- Writing and collaboration: With computers’ invention, the only option for writing was a word processor initially. However, it has changed with time with specific other innovations.