Collaborative Writing with Google Docs

In this presentation I will share and reflect on my Google docs experiments in the classroom. Many students have difficulties processing the readings; to help them navigate what is important and what is not, I have introduced a peer-review collaborative writing assignment in which the students summarize the readings every week in a Google folder, containing four to five peers. At the beginning of the week they post their summary in the assigned Google folders. They then edit and comment on the four summaries posted by their peers. Towards the end of the week I randomly pick 20% of the class to submit a revised summary. The goal of the exercise is to make students write regularly, and to practice writing as a process (to avoid students treating written assignments as a test with one final result). Submitting the summaries fulfills the writing requirements for an undergraduate survey course such as HIST 21 World History from 1300 to the present.

To add to the pool of notes/summaries on the readings available to all students, I also incorporate Google into in-class group exercises. In groups of maximum four, students analyze the historical significance of certain key concepts. One of them types up the group’s findings directly in a shared Google doc, projected by the instructor to the entire class. As the 5-minute group exercise takes place, all groups fill out their concept in the projected Google doc, and the instructor is able to follow their progress and end/prolong the exercise. After that, each group presents briefly, other groups provide feedback, and then each group has an additional two minutes to rewrite parts of their answer. The list of key concepts later serves as a midterm study guide, together with the collaboratively written summaries.