How do you convert a whole curriculum into an online mode in 1 week? That's what I was wondering at the beginning of last semester when I got the news that I would be delivering all my lessons online. Many other teachers were in the same situation. Never having taught online before was daunting and came with a lot of challenges - especially in figuring out how to adapt content and activities to the virtual classroom. To my surprise, there were a few areas that I found actually worked better in an online classroom. One of these was sharing students' written work in class so that we could do peer feedback.
In teaching my students academic writing, referencing is a completely new concept for them so I want to give them a lot of practice and feedback as they learn. When I taught the lesson in a regular classroom last year I let the students practice in class by writing references for various types of sources (I provided the elements and they had to write out the references correctly according to the style's format). At feedback time, I asked a few students to write their answers up on the board and then I invited other students to make any necessary adjustments to the punctuation, letter case, or whatever was needed to correct it. This took up a lot of class time and it wasn't possible to have everyone involved.
When I taught the same course this year I was online and so I asked the students to submit their written answers in our platform's chat box. After a few minutes all their references began popping up one by one. I could instantly see who had done the task.
Next I copied and pasted all of them into a document (deleting students' names) and shared it so everyone could see. After offering praise and correcting the first one I invited students to give feedback on their classmates' work and to make corrections.
| Students submitted their practice references online |
Here are some of the benefits I found:
- Everyone could see everyone else's writing clearly (I increased the size)
- Everyone could contribute in real time
- The exercise took less time than in class
- I could check who had actually done the task
- Students felt less "picked on" since I removed the students' names
- I could use tools like highlighter and coloured pen to draw attention to certain areas
- The changes we made were done easily since we were typing instead of hand writing
- Small details (like a comma or a space) were more easily seen
I think the students really benefited from this exercise and we did the same procedure with other short academic writing like embedding quotations and paraphrasing. In short, the students engaged in a lot more peer-feedback than they usually do in my face-to-face class.
Looking to the future, I think it could work with many kinds of tasks. I'd love to hear your ideas too.
How do you do peer-feedback in your classes?
Have you discovered any activities that work better online than face-to-face?
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