You’ve decided that you want to reduce the amount of paper in your course and that you want your students to develop collaborative and technical skills. So (perhaps after reading Julie’s recent post?) you’ve decided to use Google Documents. The ability to check the revision history will be especially handy given that you’re teaching a writing course that emphasizes the importance of revision.
And then you realize you may have a problem. One of the strengths of your institution’s writing program is that two readers in addition to the instructor read every student’s portfolio. This fact poses some difficulty for you because portfolio review is always done anonymously. Your students won’t be able to share their documents with their readers via Google Documents; they’ll have to print them.
That leads to the second problem. Portfolio readers want to see earlier drafts of the essays presented in students’ portfolios. But Google Docs only allows users to print the most recent version of a document, and having students start a new document for each revision defeats much of the purpose of the revision history feature. (It also has the added undesirable effect of cluttering up the accounts of both students and the instructor.)
As it turns out, there’s a solution. Google Documents supports the uploading of PDF documents. Printing a Google Document creates a PDF version of it. That version can be saved, and uploaded back into a user’s account.
When I make substantive comments on students’ drafts, or when students comment on one another’s drafts or do significant revisions, they (or I) need only print the document and save the resulting PDF, which will retain any comments that either of us might have added to the document. All that’s needed at that point is to upload that PDF, give it a recognizable name, and share it, so that all of us have a copy in our accounts. Each of these PDFs can be printed and placed in the students’ portfolios at the end of the semester.
I deal with less paper during the semester and can easily check revision history, the students gain experience in collaborative work, and the portfolio readers get the paper copies of drafts that they need to do their anonymous review. Everyone wins.
Comments
1. Leslie Jo - September 06, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Thanks for this post!! I am finally able to imagine myself dealing in electronic drafts, though I love my pen and paper. When looking around at it, and also thinking about sharing data with colleagues, I noticed a problem with the spread sheets.. or might be a "user error." Excel doesn't count blank cells, and the Google sheet seems confused by this. Any suggestions?
2. Amy Cavender - September 06, 2009 at 02:40 pm
Hi, Leslie Jo.
Thanks for the question! I just wish I could be of more help. I don't move between Google Spreadsheets and Excel all that much, and when I do, I'm more likely to export from Google to Excel than the other way around, so I'm afraid I've never seen the issue you mention.
Perhaps someone else could chime in?
3. Julie Meloni - September 06, 2009 at 02:43 pm
I have a ProfHacker post planned specifically about Google Spreadsheets - what exactly are you trying to do that isn't working? I'll try to cover it.
4. Leslie Jo - September 06, 2009 at 04:14 pm
It might just be me, but it appears that where Excel will total a sum that appears in cells and just ignores cells that are blank. However, when the Google spread sheets looks at it, instead of showing the total, it lists #VALUE! Strange, I know. If values are added to the empty cells it works.
5. Julie Meloni - September 06, 2009 at 04:34 pm
Interesting. I just uploaded one of my gradebook xlsx (all tricked out with formulas and such) to GDocs and all the values held. Are you working with multiple sheets or something? Catch me around sometime and I'll look at it with you. [full disclosure, Leslie Jo is in the English Dept at WSU w/ me :) ]
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