Albritton+Drafts+Holding

Hello team.

My thanks to James Avondet who volunteerd an early rough draft of his junior English paper for me to do this demonstration.

The margins on paper are always to small for me, and my handwriting is illegible anyway. My typing is 5 times as fast as my printing. My speaking is 2 times as fast as my typing. So, to get maximum student feedback bang for my minimum time spent buck, I like to type and speak comments when critiquing kids' drafts. Attached below is a sample resulting Word document. When I put sound clips into a student's essay, it sometimes makes the document too large to send by email. So what I do is post it to my wiki and share the link with the student or fellow teacher. Then by simply clicking, the file becomes available. This file is very large. It will take a few moments to open.



The saving and uploading of files does take a little effort on my part, but on larger projects I feel the improvement in kids revisions is worth the electronic hassle. Also, in short order I teach the kids to do it it for me. Eventually instead of handing their paper in to me in a phyiscal form, or even emailing them, I'll have them upload to the wiki. Then I can comment, and save back to the wiki, and if the file gets to large to email it doesn't cause any problem.

As a side benefit, the wiki becomes something of an electronic portfolio of kids work, because I can flip back and see drafts and finals of multiple assignments over time and notice patterns in their writing I might not have seen otherwise. There are probably more efficient ways of doing these things, but these are better for me than traditional paper and pencil essay grading. Anybody have thoughts on how to do it even better? Mike