Someone posted to a list I follow something to the effect that she had seen on a list that Etherpad.net was shutting down today, the date of this blog post, Dec 31, 2019. That seemed odd to me. Ethernet is open source software.
good bye! After 1896 days or roughly 62 months, the Etherpad (Lite) service Etherpad.net has shut down for good.
62 months is is also roughly a little over 5 years, but there is no date mentioned at https://etherpad.net/ as to when this notice was posted.
Etherpad Lite is described here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Etherpad_Lite
It is basically a recoding of Etherpads in Javascript to replace the previous, presumably more bloated, and likely becoming out-dated, coding scheme.
So the notice would have been posted some time after that, meaning the Etherpad Lite version had been up at that URL since some time in 2014, to be replaced by the new notice at some time in the next few weeks.
A link on the page with the notice at https://etherpad.net/ also points to https://etherpad.org/, which identifies itself as being the home portal of the Ethernet Foundation. This site allows anyone to download the open source Etherpad software so they can mount it on their own server if they wish.
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad, has a nice basic explanation of what Etherpad is and how it came about that starts off with this paragraph:
Etherpad (previously known as EtherPad) is an open-source, web-based collaborative real-time editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the participants' edits in real-time, with the ability to display each author's text in their own color. There is also a chat box in the sidebar to allow meta communication.
First launched in November 2008, the software was acquired by Google in December 2009 and released as open source later that month. Further development is coordinated by the Etherpad Foundation.
Wikipedia goes on to explain
After the release of the software as open source, a number of people have set up Etherpad servers, as clones of the original website. Soon after, users and programmers of Etherpad, after an initial meeting in the #etherpad channel on freenode, created the Etherpad Foundation to coordinate further development. Their website maintains a list of a growing number of sites that run the Etherpad software.
Here are the lists of all sites running Etherpad. They can be linked to from https://etherpad.org/ (so they appear to be the official lists of sites running Etherpad according to the Etherpad Foundation). They are categorized into sites running original Etherpad code and those running the re-coded Etherpad-lite (Javascript version). The two sites are further subcategorized into sites that are SSL-enabled and non-SSL enabled (and also sites that are inactive, those reporting errors, and one or two that are not free).
SSL is the secure socket layer that distinguishes whether a site runs under http:// or https://. This page provides a decent explanation, https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/ssl-enabled-20386.html.
It also explains that the term SSL is essentially no longer meaningful, and refers now to TLS.
SSL/TLS is a security system that combines authentication and encryption. In regular communication over a network, a client contacts a server with a request. The server replies with a response. Under SSL, only the client needed to present authentication. With TLS, both the client and server must prove their identity. The identification procedure includes an encryption key, which is used to protect all transmissions once the connection has been established.
That particular chat space has been up for years. According to its "time slider" it was started on May 5, 2013 and had recorded 15,309 distinct edits by the day this post was made, and 34 edits since then, each of which can be played back and revisited one by one in the time slider (or you can click on the slider to see clusters of edits at their approximate location on your time line but you can't just change the edit number in the URL, doesn't work for me at any rate).
This is impressive software and is a testament to open source communities in the way it is implemented, regulated, and maintained. However, if you use this software, heed the warning coded into each new page you create at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ ...
Welcome to the WMF etherpad installation. Please keep in mind all current as well as past content in any pad is public. Removing content from a pad does not mean it is deleted. Keep in mind as well that there is no guarantee that a pad's contents will always be available. A pad may be corrupted, deleted or similar. Please keep a copy of important data somewhere else as well.
The thing to keep in mind with Etherpad is that is it nicely working open source code that has been mounted on hundreds of servers all over the world. The health of your Etherpad depends on the server it is working on, not on the existence of Etherpad itself, whose code is being maintained and made available for download by the Etherpad Foundation at https://etherpad.org. So despite Etherpad sites coming and going with the usual fluctuation we have come to expect from anything you can get for free on the Internet, with Etherpad, the code has gone viral, so like the common cold, if you lose one you can surely find another.
And on that topic, here is an Easter egg for you, something unexpected as a reward for reading all the way to the bottom (or scrolling here, whatever). I've been drafting an article for the February, 2020 issue of TESL-EJ on the most significant losses of Web 2.0 software to have disappeared from the palettes of educators over the past ten years.
On Friday March 9, 2018 I gave a presentation at the ALLT conference in Dubai on "Teaching writing to students with tablets using voice to overcome keyboard shortcomings". Here is the abstract I submitted with the proposal:
Abstract The presenter has for the past few years been refining techniques to overcome shortcomings in the digital keyboards inherent to most tablet computers and other mobile devices by using voice to help students compose and revise essays on their iPads. The technique uses Google Docs or similar online word processing software such as Office 365, for voice input. However, Arab students have problems getting voice recognition to work for them in English, so the presenter has them begin their essays on paper, create a blank online document, and share it with the teacher. The teacher then uses the voice capability native to his or her tablet device to read what the students have written into their shared online documents prior to having them revise those documents on their tablets. This 20 minute presentation will demonstrate the technique, discuss problems encountered and solutions discovered, and show examples of student-teacher interaction during the revision process using this technique.
This post was created in March 2018 to accompany my presentation at the ALLT conference in that month. At some point I stopped working here and finalized the work as a submission to the ALLT Proceedings for 2018. The submission was accepted and published as a paper, which you can access through the reference section below (Stevens, 2019). One advantage to reading this here is that you get a fuller uncut version and with illustrations interleaved with the text. The ALLT editors had me delete what they felt might be distracting to their readership and they had me move all the illustrations to the appendices. I find it's easier to understand what is being referred to when the illustrated examples appear as figures in the text. In any event you can read it that way here, and if you wish to reference this work, please use Stevens, 2019 as it appears in the references below (with link to open-access full text from the online version of the proceedings)
Subsequently ...
This article describes how I have refined a technique I have been exploring for the past 7 years wherein I have been getting students to compose in Google Docs or similar online word processing software such as Office 365 and then have them revise using the interactive tools inherent to those platforms. In the past this has involved their initiating their writing process online, and I would provide feedback in their shared document, and try to work with them to help them revise their papers as they returned to their documents and encountered my feedback. Eventually, I found I could provide feedback to my students by bringing their work up on the classroom projector where the student would see it on his or her computer, and I could provide feedback on the document by articulating comments which I could speak into my iPad, and the students would synchronously see my comments appear in their document on their iPads (Stevens, 2015).
Having students compose in Google Docs has worked well when my students have had devices such as laptops with keyboards, but less well when the students have tablet computers where there is no keyboard. Accordingly, I've been refining techniques to overcome shortcomings in the digital keyboards inherent to most tablet computers and other mobile devices by using voice to help students compose and revise essays on their iPads. Because Arab students have problems getting voice recognition to work for them in English, I have them begin their essays on paper, create a blank online document, and share it with the teacher. The teacher then uses voice on his or her tablet device to read in correct English what the students have written into their shared online documents prior to having them revise those documents on their tablets. This paper discusses problems encountered and solutions discovered, and shows examples of student-teacher interaction during the revision process using this technique.
The problem I need to overcome in my particular context
The students to whom I was teaching writing at the time of this presentation were at a military aviation college in UAE. Many of them avoid writing beyond the minimum required for completion of classroom tasks, or simply avoid doing those tasks. When they write during class, they are not inclined to follow through afterwards. When asked to
revise, their typical response is “finished teacher,” meaning we did that
already and now we're done with it. Revision and writing process are not in their expectations. They see
little value in taking the time to correct errors, even though that may be the sole purpose of an hour-long follow-up class. They prefer to sit writing exams with as little
preparation as possible. They do not see improvement of their ability to write in English to be of much value in their anticipated career trajectory.
Writing instruction where I teach is assessment driven. Since the students do so little writing, have in fact done too little writing in their early education and come to us with deficient skills sets even in basic grammar and vocabulary, and are so resistant to making the effort to write much of substance, teachers instinctively use whatever class time they have for writing preparation in test-directed activities. These can be formulaic and boring to the students. There are exceptions of course, but it seems that no matter what the purpose of the essay (argumentative, etc) many students learn only to begin paragraphs with firstly, secondly, etc. without much regard to internalizing a wider range of cohesive devices. Their motivation to write is mostly extrinsic; few of the students appear to have experienced much joy in writing, at least in English. Their resistance to the process and the limited time available to prepare them across all aspects of their largely assessment-driven curriculum leads most teachers and students in this setting to focus on tasks designed to quickly train students to successfully write set pieces that will fit the parameters of a prescribed marking rubric rather than to explore writing for its own sake and for the benefit it would bring to all aspects of the curriculum, including improvement in critical thinking skills, if more time could be devoted to it.
Even the modality of writing is contentious. Since the essays are usually written out longhand during most tests given in most contexts where I have worked in the UAE (though that is changing), some teachers feel that preparation for tests should also be done longhand in the same modality. I have long felt the contrary, that the format shouldn’t matter as much as the process the students will need to employ while writing their essays in whatever format, but my attempts to get students to write on PCs and iPads have met with limited success, in the first instance due to the students' lack of keyboard proficiency, and with iPads, due to a lack of keyboard. Writing on iPad is frustrating for me as well, and I try and avoid it by using a device with a keyboard if possible, or if I need to compose on an iPad or a tablet device, I might use that device's voice-recognition features if feasible. This is the feature I utilized when developing the technique described here, where I hit on having the students compose in longhand, then read what they had written (correctly, in good English) into Google Docs on my iPad, and then gave them the resulting texts in both hard and soft copy, with my comments, for them to revise as they saw fit, in Google Docs if they would use it, or in longhand revisions if that is what they preferred.
The problem of providing teacher feedback on writing
Teachers have long grappled with the problem of conveying feedback on student writing in a meaningful way. There is a plethora of literature on the effectiveness of various kinds of written markup on student papers. Hyland and Hyland (2006) present an excellent overview of the issues surrounding a variety of teacher feedback techniques. They raise questions relating to feedback such as: "Does it make a difference to students’ writing? If so, in what areas? What is the best way of delivering feedback? Can error correction and form focused feedback have long term benefits on students’ writing? Can technology play a greater part in delivering feedback?" (p.83).
Literature is cited to suggest it isn't, though there are the obvious confounding variables "of varied populations, treatments and research designs" (p.84). This is true in my experience. I have found many effective ways of providing feedback over my decades-long career teaching writing to students who were in varying stages of maturity and who were often highly motivated to respond to it. But the present report regards the UAE context where teachers are likely to find a larger than hoped for number of students with limited skills sets and minimal desire to improve them, possibly due in part to the fact that once these students have reached the tertiary stages of education, the tasks so far outstrip their ability to cope with them. Thus a common reaction of my students to my feedback on their writing is to simply ignore it. As Hyland and Hyland characterize the problem:
"Studies suggest that students may ignore or misuse teacher commentary when revising drafts. Sometimes they misunderstand it ... or they understand the problems pointed out but are unable to come up with a suitable revision ... and sometimes this causes them to simply delete the offending text to avoid the issues raised." (p.87)
I have in the past ten years been using Google Docs extensively with my students and this has resulted in a large data-base where dozens if not hundreds of students have shared files with me and where I have provided them with markup on their work which I expected them to follow up on. I have never systematically analyzed it, but the data would show that once I started teaching in the military sector in UAE, students, more often than not, never bothered to address their errors by revisiting the files where I had left them comments. As Hyland and Hyland put it, feedback "will only be effective if it engages with the writer."
This is where I undertook to refine my techniques in an effort to engage more effectively with students that one is likely to encounter at some point when teaching at the lower levels in the Arab context.
Recent applications of technology to improving feedback on writing
This article seeks to add to the growing list of suggestions on how technology can be brought to bear on the problem of engaging generally unmotivated learners in the revision phases of the writing process. One milestone in making large numbers of teachers aware of how free and easy-to-use Web 2.0 technology could help bring about improvements to feedback given to students was Stannard's (2008) ground-breaking work on screencasting himself bringing his student' writing up on his screen and screencasting himself recording audio feedback on their work. Stannard used the free tool Jing (Techsmith) to make his first screencasts, but soon replaced this with the more versatile Camtasia (also produced by Techsmith, but not free). Stannard felt from his reasearch that on this tool that it was not at its best when pointing out errors in mechanics (form) that could be addressed effectively in other ways; rather "It might actually be that video feedback works best when correcting ideas and concepts which require elaboration," (i.e. when addressing function).
Dobrou (2017) addresses the potential of technology in helping teachers provide feedback thusly:
"with digital feedback [on writing], they get to listen to detailed comments by their teacher at their own pace and they will have to take the time to do so while looking at their piece of writing in more detail. They can later be asked to rewrite it."
Alvira (2016) conducted a study of his students in Colombia using Stannard's method. In his literature search he notes that a part of his rationale for exploring screencasting as a feedback technique is that other researchers have "demonstrated that teacher comments on feedback on content are usually vague, contradictory and sometimes provide no guidance to the student ... The outcome of this situation is that students often become frustrated and discouraged and consequently ignore the comments, a situation which reduces the possibility of students improving their writing skills".p.82
Alvira cites a PhD dissertation by Hartshorn (2008) who found that ideally, feedback on writing must be manageable, timely, meaningful, and constant. Manageable means that the teacher has to be able to cope with the load of marking student papers. Timely means that feedback needs to reach the student as soon as possible after each draft. Meaningful means the student has to be able to understand it, and constant means that the feedback keeps coming.
The technique described here addresses all of these considerations. My situation was not unusual in that I might teach two or three writing classes a day, each with 15 to 22 students, and I had to get them to produce writing and process it quickly and effectively (manageable), provide feedback they could understand (simple feedback was most meaningful) and return it to them the next day (timely) so that they could undertake their revisions (and get more feedback).
In this last iteration of working through this technique I had decided that I could get better results from students if I had them begin writing using pen and paper. Otherwise some might be tempted to plagiarize, consuming my time unproductively in dealing with that and setting back my efforts to help them, Plus they preferred to write by hand. Though revision would normally require even more handwriting, their conception of the task was to write it out once and forget about it. Improving writing through revision was not something they had had much practice with.
I would take their papers to a quiet place and read their papers one by one into a Google Document. I would find that the students on average produced about 50 to 150 words per class period, but often only just one or two dozen words. I read the papers back in correct English. I found that for the reasons mentioned above, taking time to address errors at this stage was not the best use of time. Rather than bogging the students down in working out where there errors were and how to correct them, I wanted them to continue working from something that they had produced but had magically been rendered into excellent English. If you believe in magic you might also believe that if you keep your students writing they might somehow improve their English just through practice and working on fluency, and this is what I wanted to take place in my writing classes. While the students worked, I would interact with them as best I could to help them with questions as they arose, rather than confounding them with all the answers written in red on their papers, before they had had time to formulate their questions. My comments addressed a few matters of form, but were usually directed at bigger issues, such as structuring paragraphs logically, and how to develop the paper by providing examples, conclusions, or whatever else was needed to get the composition to follow a successful exam model.
What my students need to know about the writing process
I try to inform my students about the writing process in a handout I give them
In this class, we work using the same WRITING PROCESS that you should apply when you sit your final writing assessment in this course.
This explains How to
follow the PROCESS of WRITING
All good
writers revise!
·In the past, before
we had computers, we had to write or type out multiple drafts, or versions, of what we wanted to write.
·NOW, with computers,
we can write out what’s on our minds in a FIRST DRAFT, but then we think more deeply and change what we wrote in second, third, etc. drafts
Here is
the process
·First draft, get some ideas down on paper or
into a word processor
·Second draft / third draft, go back and
Add detail
Reorganize for better coherence
Find better words
Add transition words for better cohesion
Check spelling
You will need to follow the writing process on paper by scratching out words,
writing between the lines, etc.
Think about your writing as a process you can continually
improve by
Writing out and
submitting a quick 100 word first draft.
Revising your draft considering teacher feedback, and thinking about how you can improve it through
a.Adding detail, improving introductions and conclusions b. Better organization, rewording, choosing better connecting words and phrases
And then develop your first draft into a 250 word second / third draft
a.It’s important that you work fromand build onyour first draft
b.Work from your teacher’s
feedback. Do NOT start over.
Previous iterations of my work have had students composing in
Google Docs or in Office 365 (Google Docs is far superior), where I would edit
their work and try and get them to correct it. Some students would do this but many wouldn’t, depending on their motivation to learn. One nice thing about
Google Docs is that I have records of this kind of work going back years. There
is evidence of some student success, such as the video recording I made of my
synchronous interactions with one student who clearly benefited from the
experience, at least in the moment.
Some disadvantages to using tablet devices to begin the writing process
The main disadvantage to using tablets at the early stages of writing is the lack of keyboard. The school where I teach has transitioned from giving earlier cohorts of students PCs to giving them iPads, and for this age group, there have been problems with focus and distraction which are not the topic of this article. As pertains to the present topic, I have noticed that composition on iPads is awkward for my students. They are not able to use voice input themselves for reasons addressed in my earlier work (cited above), so I came up with the technique described here to get them started writing on paper, and having them carry out the revision process on their iPads. Another disadvantage of students’ composing on Internet-connected devices in general is that
they will often pursue one of two counterproductive strategies. One is to copy swathes of text from the Internet and submit it as their work, and the
other is to compose in Arabic, run that through a translator, and spew out the
result in what I call a 'word salad'. There isn’t much to do about the word salad resulting from translation. Since the student’s message does not emerge, I can only tell them to try and rewrite it in their own words. Students will be as overwhelmed with the task of unraveling what it was they were trying to say as I am in trying to help them work it out from the word salad they have put before me, and they see that the best solution is to start over, if they are going to proceed.
Often a simple
Google search will expose plagiarism. For example, my Student 1, whose work is described below, submitted this passage (on paper) from something he was copying from his iPad which he had beneath his desk in his lap:
Using voice tools in Google Docs enables me to quickly render text into machine-readable format that can then be pasted into Google. Since I read all my students' work into Google Docs now in order to give them feedback, by doing that I am also in position to quickly check their work for plagiarism. When I read Student 1's work into the iPad, it was transcribed as:
I want to play football but there is an effect of anxiety of badminton players and its relation to the level of accomplishment. This study aimed to investigate the level of anxiety of the badminton players and its relationship to the level of accomplishment. Also the effect of the professional player in developing the level.
By way of feedback, I informed the student that his work was partially copied from the abstract of this study. The study itself was in Arabic but the student obviously lifted from this study of anxiety in badminton players to inform his paper on football.
I asked the student to try again in a later class and the second time he produced the following:
Reading this into Google Docs, I saw,
Football is one of the most famous sports in the world and I like to play the football. Countries and organizations attach great importance to the formation of teams for each country to compete in the world and to represent the country in international and annual competitions, whether annual, monthly, weekly, or otherwise. This is a very enjoyable sport, as well as a source of income in countries with large teams with high skills that win the world level and gain a strong competitive edge in this field. And I like UAE teams because they are strong teams and I love them, and I like sports because it helps my life.
This time the work was at least on the topic of football, but this was from a student who up to now had produced no original writing in my class. How could he have on his own generated this cohesive and error free text, which incidentally does not address any aspect of football as an extreme sport? By now, in seeing the way I work, my students had begun to find other sources of text that I could not find in Google. They would even challenge me to find it, sometimes gloating when I couldn't, and then double down on their insistence that this was their work. Something like Turnitin might have worked to expose plagiarism, but we don’t have access at the college where I teach. Again having at hand a machine-readable transcription of what they have written enables me to make cloze passages from their work and revert the challenge on them by seeing whether they can fill in any of the missing words. So I gave Student 1 this exercise
Your mark on the paper you wrote for me in class yesterday can be your score on the words that you can replace in this paragraph, which you handed in as your own writing. If you did not copy this from somewhere, then you will know the words that you used in writing this.
Countries and organizations __________ great importance to the __________ of teams for each country to __________ in the world and to __________ the country in international and __________ competitions, whether annual, monthly, weekly, or otherwise. This is a very enjoyable sport, as well __________ a source of __________ in countries with __________ teams with high skills that win the world __________ and gain a strong competitive __________ in this field.
The student made no attempt to guess that missing words from what he had claimed was his own writing. He did however produce a third version in his own words.
Using teacher voice to help students engage in a writing process
In order to get the students to produce first drafts of their writing more quickly than they can do it on an iPad and to be able to give them fast and improved feedback on their writing, as well as to counter and discourage these counterproductive strategies, I have my students
Start
writing on paper in class.
I have them create and share a blank Google Doc with me.
Once they have done this, I take their papers and
speak what they wrote into their shared Google Docs. This corrects their spelling, grammar, and punctuation and
gives them something to go on in revising their work in a follow-up class.
The teacher prints out a hard copy of the student's work, makes some corrections and suggestions there, but in particular addresses more global issues that the student might work on.
This
makes further revision much more efficient than with other methods, since what
they have written already is rendered into correct English. The students can open the soft copy on their iPads, and they can use their limited time for revision to strengthen arguments or complete the work they started.
Here is an example of what the technique looks like in practice. In this example, Student 2 responds to the writing prompt by writing the following in class, on paper
The student did not appear to address the task very seriously. He wrote 50 words in the 30 minutes assigned to the project, half the number of words the teacher was expecting from the weakest students in the class. Yet this student is not weak. He makes interesting analogies with attacking and hunting regarding the pursuit of balls controlled by opponents while passionately engaged in the 'extreme sport' of soccer.
Teachers are often at a loss as to how to respond to written student writing in an effective way. All manner of markups have been proposed in the decades I have been teaching. One thing that does not appear to work well is decorating the paper in red squiggles and expecting the student to respond thoughtfully to each squiggle. This is a shame because teachers pour heart and soul, and copious amounts of time, into those squiggles, often with relatively dismissive acknowledgement from the students.
In Student 2's case, teacher takes 5 minutes to read the student's work into Google Docs and produces this in soft-copy, prints it out, and marks it up with suggestions for revision.
In this technique, just the act of reading it into Google Docs is perhaps an effective feedback for the student. The teacher has obviously taken time to literally read the student's work. Students may or may not notice the spelling and grammatical changes, but they are just as likely to not notice them even if they are highlighted in red. Feedback here is focused on what the student should do next. This is designed to keep the student writing. And the time it takes to make suggestions on a printout of a paper that has been "corrected" though voice rendition into text is a fraction of the time it takes to address errors one by one and then provide that valuable holistic feedback.
Here we can see that the student took some of this on board to add more substance to two of the paragraphs, bringing his work much nearer to standard, and addressing the task with more thoughtfulness than before.
In practice some of my students simply
ignore the feedback the teacher has provided and might change the topic or
start over using one of the counterproductive strategies mentioned earlier, in
which case they waste their time and that of the teacher. But those who carry
forward with the process can usually improve their work more effectively than if they were revising by hand. For those who follow the process the results have exceeded methods I have tried in the past.
Here is the work of Student 3 to show how he responded to the technique. This task began with an "essay planner" where the students completed reasons and examples for an advantages / disadvantages essay:
Here the student has converted these points into an essay on paper using a reasonably coherent structure.
The teacher reads this into Google Docs, notes from Google's word count that the work is well crafted but short of the 200 word target (168 words), and returns it to the student. I probably spoke to the student about his work when doing this, offering my suggestions orally.
The student does not respond to the suggestion (in red) that he rephrase the introduction to avoid "lifting" words from the prompt that will not figure into his final word count, but he does add additional information to two paragraphs that significantly improve the paper, highlighted in yellow below.
These small revisions might seem trivial to teachers of students of strong writers who faithfully engage with a writing program, but small victories are significant with students whose English is so weak that their writer's block is rooted in deeply negative attitudes toward something they feel they will never do well. Student 1 was in a class of the weakest students in the institute, and when I started working with them, they would tell me, as if it were all the explanation needed, "We are level 1, teacher." So let us return to the case of Student 1, the one whose first attempts at writing in my class were plagiarized. When I finally got him to see that I would not accept that, he finally, on third try, produced this:
Clap for the student :-)
I read this into Google Docs and was finally able to give him some meaningful feedback.
When the student seemed to still be struggling, I have him an essay planner handout and had him complete it with ideas that would help him organize an acceptable essay. Here is what he did with it:
I recorded this into Google Docs ...
As we see, the student was making progress. I'm not sure what kind of help he was getting from classmates, but as I pointed out earlier, I count success in the fact that the technique employed got the student to persist in his writing and follow a process which he might be starting to internalize. I believe he also benefited from this modicum of success he may not have thought possible as an individual who saw himself as a level one student.
The students I work with are challenging. Class sizes are large, and many of our students use that to hide out in class and avoid work while the teacher focuses on the more responsive students. Teachers need a technique that will enable them to address the initial efforts of all students quickly and draw them out the way that Student 2 was encouraged to make meaningful revisions in his paper. Having students start the writing process on paper usually gets them to write something, and putting that into Google Docs gives them something to take to the next level without having to re-write anything from scratch.
I find the technique described here to be an effective way of dealing with several classes which collectively produce several dozen short essays in a day. I can usually address the work of a class of up to 20 students in about an hour, and return them something next class that will get them moving into the next phase of the writing process. The technique seems to work well with some of my students.
Mogey, N., Paterson, J., Burk, J. & Purcell, M. (2010). Typing compared with handwriting for essay examinations at university: Letting the students choose. ALT-J, 18 (1), 29-47, DOI: 10.1080/09687761003657580. Available: https://journal.alt.ac.uk/index.php/rlt/article/view/873/1124
Stannard, R. (2008). Screen capture software for feedback in language education. In Thomas, M. (Ed.). (2007-2009). Proceedings of the second annual International Wireless Ready Symposium: Interactivity, collaboration & feedback in language learning technologies, pp. 16-20. Available: http://wirelessready.nucba.ac.jp/Stannard.pdf
Stevens, V. (2015). Finding Your Voice: Teaching Writing Using Tablets with Voice Capability. TESL-EJ 19 (3), 1-11. Available: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf
Stevens, V. (2019). Teaching writing to students with tablets using voice to overcome keyboard shortcomings. In Zoghbor, W., Al Alami, S., & Alexiou, T. (Eds.). (2019). Proceedings of the 1st Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching Conference: Teaching and Learning in a Globalized World. Dubai: Zayed University Press, pp.22-47. Retrieved from https://www.zu.ac.ae/main/en/research/publications/_books_reports/2018/ALLT2018Proceedings.pdf.
Additional notes
I found that keeping a class set in one document worked best from a management standpoint.It usually too, me less than an hour to read a class set.
Motivating students to write can in and of itself be a problem, especially when writing is done in preparation for a test (extrinsically motivated, if even that, vs. intrinsically, not at all).
Pesce, C. (n.d). How to Effectively Teach English Writing Skills. Busy Teacher. Available: https://busyteacher.org/2971-how-to-effectively-teach-english-writing-skills.html
says "If they're not involved in the writing task, in other words, if they don't have a reason to write, the task you set forth won’t be an effective learning experience." Unfortunately the remedies he proposes are themselves the problem with my students, such as these "examples of some great writing prompts:
- Who is your favorite actor/actress and why?
- What are the three items you’d take to a deserted island and why?" or worse, the typical IELTS exam genres and topics that teachers tend to try and anticipate and then have students write on for the best directed practice in limited classtime available for them to write in.
Once a first draft is grudgingly produced, getting students to work on revision is another significant hurdle, and is in fact the major point of providing feedback.
Finally there is the issue of whether students should write by hand if that's the way the test will be taken.
Bonn, A. (n.d.). Practicing Essay Writing to Get Better at Writing. Available: https://study.com/academy/lesson/practicing-essay-writing.html
"Because many exams require that you write persuasive essays, it may be a good idea to start your practice with one. Give yourself an hour and a quiet room. You can hand-write or type your essay."
The article is about the importance of retaining the spacial and tactile aspects of writing and how that impacts how children learn. Drawing from a panel, she relates that "Teachers can sometimes be wary of technology because it doesn’t always fit with their idea of what educational success is, said Boden. But Merchant insisted digital literacy was essential, especially in a world where means of communication are rapidly diversifying.
So is there a balance to be struck in how we teach children to write? For Idress, this is key: making sure we help children choose the right tool for the task in hand – whether that’s a pen, a laptop, or something else."
While not a study specifically testing hand vs. machine written exam preparation (where students usually prepared online but traditionally took handwritten exams) Mogey, Paterson, Burk & Purcell (2010) conducted a study "designed to explore any systematic differences in mark awarded due to the format in which the examination script was created. Only small differences have been found in the mark awarded to an examination script depending on the format of the script (typed or handwritten) but the difference is not significant and is trivial compared with variation between markers. It has been shown that students are able to type more than they can handwrite, but this was not associated with their reported typing speed. Students who wrote more tended to get slightly more marks, but again this was not associated with reported typing speed." (p.45) This would lend credence to the argument that preparation in one medium should not in and of itself impact the results of exams taken in another medium, leading the researchers to conclude that "No evidence has been found of systematic differences in essay quality due to the format, and data about how students report approaching a handwritten essay versus a typed essay from this study is inconclusive; differences may or may not exist."(p.46)
For some time I have been developing techniques for teaching writing using Google Docs, starting when my students and I were all in the PC environment a few years back. At that time the students would open documents and share them with me and I would provide feedback as best I could. The quality of the feedback in the Google Docs environment has always been superior to that possible by other means, especially where the class sizes were large or the students not particularly motivated nor attentive. With Google Docs it was always possible to view student writing while students were writing it, and then work one-on-one with whichever students were engaged in the process at the time. This is because the teacher can display any student’s work on his/her personal tablet, or display it on the class data projector and correct it there while the student follows on PC, or as the case may be, on iPad.
The work could of course be corrected asynchronously, after class, while the students were not present. Recently I was correcting a student’s work in my office at a time when the student happened to be in a lecture elsewhere on campus. The student, from his class, was following my corrections in real time and responding to them, multitasking (and perhaps neglecting the lecture). Possibly the lecture was not that interesting, but I like to think that the student was simply more engaged by the notion of working with a teacher one-on-one in real time in addressing feedback on his writing wherever he happened to be, and whenever, not just during our class time. I thought to make a screencast: http://screencast.com/t/fmW5zZoZUF.
Giving feedback on writing is a challenge that does not scale well. Teachers are well aware of how tedious it is to give quality feedback on student writing paper after paper and mechanically by hand. My work with Google Docs has been in an effort to develop techniques for correcting student work as efficiently as possible. My classes are normally large, more than 20 students, and giving meaningful feedback on work prepared by hand on paper in conjunction with sufficient writing practice is hardly feasible. Also when I annotate paper drafts handed in by students, my feedback is rarely acted on; whereas in the Google Docs environment, students will more often read and respond to my comments, and I can deal with classes of 20 students as the work comes in, effectively and efficiently. It’s more efficient for the students as well, since they canfocus only on only the issues I have flagged without having to re-write parts of the paper on which I have not commented..
Techniques
Here is the essence of what I have learned over several years of using Google Docs with students:
Figure 1 - Shortcuts and tips for using Google Docs in teaching writing
When I first started using Google Docs I used to make corrections to text that are tedious on a PC and even more so to do on an iPad. Also, I had little evidence that my students ever went back to the text to view such details let alone correct them, and so I assume they did not internalize very well what I was trying to make them aware of. I finally settled on just two tools that appear to work best when correcting student writing: the strikeout tool and the comment feature. These are great time-savers when scaled over numerous correction tasks, especially as both have keyboard shortcuts on PC, which make them quick to implement. For strikeout, you merely highlight some text and press alt-shift-5, like this. To make a comment, you highlight the text and press ctrl-alt-m (on PC). My correction technique has distilled almost entirely into using these two tools. Now I find that my students often ask about the comments, and gratifyingly, even correct even correct their work in response to them.
I usually correct student work, whether created on iPad or PC, on a PC. Google Docs on iPad has some omissions, one of which is an obvious strike-through tool. It’s a multi-step process to reach this screen: select the text you want to strike-through, touch the format menu, and finally touch the icon you want (to get at the full range of format features you find on PC, you have to revert to desktop view, where you then lose some useful iPad functionality).
Figure 2 - How to strike through text on iPad Similarly, leaving comments on iPad is a matter of selecting text and then pressing the comment option. Leaving comments using the iPad touch screen keyboard might be relatively awkward compared to invoking ctrl-alt-m and then typing using the keyboard on a PC, but here we find a time-saver native to iPad and mobile devices in general. On these devices you can activate voice input, which makes it possible to mingle with students, observe their work, bring up their files on your iPad, and literally speak your suggestions into their texts as you move from student to student.
Figure 3 - iPad allows option of typing or speaking comments in Google Docs As regards management of large numbers of student submissions, it is essential that teachers set up some kind of file structure in Google Drive. When students share documents with you, they can be found under the ‘Shared with Me’ tag, but if you have several classes or several assignments that students share with you, you soon see the benefit of creating folders for classes and for separating assignments into those folders. Google has changed the way that drive looks in the folder view. It used to be that when you “moved” a doc to a folder its tag was removed from Shared with Me, which uncluttered the shared view. Then Google programmers decided not to move the file but to leave it tagged both places (in the Google system nothing really moves; files are simply tagged, so this means the files in Shared with Me now retain rather than lose that tag and so remain visible in the Shared with Me view). Assigning them a new folder, i.e. adding that folder-name tag, means they can be viewed also in that folder, which is really a way of aggregating content according to the folder name under which files so tagged are viewed. In short, if you are working with dozens or hundreds of files, you need to tag them so as to organize them efficiently in Drive (Google have often changed the way this works, looks, and feels, but this is the system at this time of writing).
You can of course find your files by searching for them, but this can be tedious if you want to view the work of a particular class, compared to tagging them so they appear to be in folders. Still, one great affordance of Google Docs is that the hundreds or thousands of files you have there are all searchable. You can find files easily by entering a string present in their contents or in a part of the document name, which is one reason it’s a good idea to impose standard naming conventions on files that students create and share with you (and since they share them giving the teacher editing rights, the teacher can always clean up file names so they fall under the convention). I include students’ names as part of my convention because I’ve noticed that in PC view user names are given in your drive listing, but in iPad view, only email addresses of file creators might be given, which might not necessarily help you identify your students.
With the introduction of digital tools into the writing process, and with texting influencing writing as suggested in David Crystal’s The gr8 db8 (2008), or in Pegrum (2009, as in this example from p.1, reproduced here in Figure 4), writing appears to be converging more and more with its aural origins.
Lindsay Clandfield gave an interesting presentation which I attended at a recent TESOL Arabia conference where he pointed out that when writing first happened, it was as a way to record what someone had said, either to tell a story on a cave or pyramid wall, or to use a scroll prepared by a scribe to issue forth an edict or proclamation made aurally by an authority, to whom writing might have been a painstaking and specialized skill best left to technicians.
Texting circumvents spelling conventions and reduces keystrokes to concise representations of what the words sound like. Clandfield (2014) sees in this trend, as well as in the new emphasis on communicative methods, a return to oral tradition in writing. In his words:
Rediscovering Writing / What’s happening to writing
Communicative approaches to language teaching have put much value on the oral skill. Classrooms around the world have, over the past thirty years, devoted more and more time in class to speaking, which is generally seen as a good thing. Writing however, has remained relatively unchanged. Often assigned for homework, or in the form of longer pieces of writing (the composition, the essay, the business letter) this skill has just not seemed as interesting as speaking. However, due to technological developments we are all writing now a lot more than we used to. In some cases, we write more to people than we talk to them.
When the college where I teach went over to iPad, I had to get used to the fact that the students had a different set of apps to work with while I mainly used my PC, since with PC I retained superior keyboard functionality and had better access to my organized file structure in Google Drive. The students were able to cope with the iPad environment and use the touch keyboard to enter text despite its annoying limitations. But gradually, as noted earlier, I came to realize that the iPad and other tablet and mobile devices are particularly attuned to voice input. I began to experiment with ways that the option for voice input could augment the task of writing, since much of the data entry work that had been tedious in the past could in fact be short-cut through use of voice activation on iPad.
This piece is about interjecting voice, literally, into writing. It is about utilizing the apps you need to do that, Google Drive and Google Docs, organizing your Drive so that it can accept student work through an efficient content management system, and possibly getting students themselves talking into Google Docs as a way of getting started, if they prefer that to drafting on paper.
Other voice tools on iPad and PC
My EFL students are not able to get the voice tools working for them as well as I can. For them the voice recognition engine stumbles on their mispronunciations and intonation, their inexperience with working with voice (as when they blurt asides while speaking, or don’t enunciate clearly into the mic), and mainly from the ambient noise in the classroom. So I give them the option in class of writing a first draft or brainstorming on paper and then, after collecting the paper, I read their handwritten work into Google Docs. Normally, I use the iPad to read from their handwritten papers directly into a blank Google Doc they have shared with me beforehand. I have that same document open in a PC where I can most efficiently clean up any voice-input errors using the PC keyboard.
Before trying out voice directly in Google Docs, I had tried third party tools such as Dragon Dictation, which does a good job when the speaker enunciates clearly in identifying allophones and making a best guess at typing out utterances from words stored in its comprehensive database (or when for whatever reason, the keyboard mic is not functioning on a student’s iPad - in Dragon Dictation the mic almost always works).
I found I could use this tool on iPad to model writing for the students and project it at the head of the class. I would prompt them and elicit from them their expression of points that fit a process I was trying to inculcate, and as they told me in class what they thought we might write, I would read it into Dragon Dictation and it would all appear on the screen in legible font when projected from iPad onto the whiteboard. The result could then be exported to other apps for manipulation in appropriate tools.
In March 2015, I presented at TESOL Arabia in Dubai about creating listening exercises for students using Dragon Dictation and on one PC counterpart called Dictanote. In Stevens (2015a), I wrote:
… making corrections to the text you have just recorded requires some dexterity with finger pointing and activating the keyboard exactly where you want it to appear in the text, especially if the text has gone to the bottom of the screen. I find it difficult but doable. This leads to the second problem, getting the text from the iPad into something I can work with. For me, real work requires a hard keyboard so I like to create exercises on my PC. To get from Dragon Dictation to a PC I use email, but of course I have to be connected if I want it right away; either that or I have to create multiple texts and leave them on my iPad and get them later when I am back online (see Figure 5, below).
Figure 5: Early experiments with Dragon Dictation
The iPad is wonderful for having all you need, mic and apps, in a single device the size of a mouse pad. But if you are willing to work from PC then there are several tools you can use. One ishttp://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net/ which allows you to speak into a mic on the left and renders the text on the right. You can copy what you get into whatever you are using to process text and work with that more seamlessly than if you start on iPad and end up on PC.
A tool I like even better is Dictanote,https://dictanote.co/, because it combines speech to text with the functionality of a digital notepad, which allows you to make corrections as you speak in a way that the other applications don’t. Dictanote lets you speak into your word processor and make corrections on the fly. A problem I had initially with Dragon Dictation was that I was unable to signal carriage returns, so paragraphs of text tended to run together and were hard later to tease apart. I have since found that if you keep handy a set of voice commands, you can invoke pronunciation; see for examplehttp://isource.com/2009/12/09/some-tips-for-dragon-dictation/.
With Dictanote I can simply join up text or enter the carriage returns on the fly where I need them a lot more easily than I can with Dragon Dictation or Google Docs on the iPad. There’s a full set of text processing tools available, even an autocorrect tool (though it doesn’t know when users are trying to say the name of the product :-). Still, you can do preliminary work right in Dictanote and copy your text from there into your word processor pretty much the way you want it (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Dictanote in action
Yet another advantage of using continuous SR engines is that while you are recording into them, you can create a simultaneous audio recording on another device. I like to speak into Dragon Dictation or Google Docs on my iPad while recording that speech in Audacity on a PC. It makes good recordings for EFL learners because I speak distinctly during voice input, and if anything too slowly for Audacity, but it is an easy matter to go back into the recording to remove gaps and close up the utterances (and if you speak into Google Docs on iPad you can clean up the text on a PC more easily than you can on iPad).
The affordances of these tools used in conjunction on mobile and desktop devices open many possibilities for language learning contexts. Once you learn how to speak punctuation into your iPad or dictation-enabled device, life gets even easier.This screen-shot from a Lifehacker post illustrates the process (Figure 7):
Apps can be found to address all stages of the writing process. One tool my students enjoy for brainstorming is called DocsStoryBuilder, available from http://docsstorybuilder.appspot.com/.
This tool encourages students to have fun while creating short dialogs, such as to brainstorm ideas for a writing project. It’s not an app, and disappointingly, I have been unable to get its music to play on the iPad (so I play what the students produce on my PC), but their conversations can be created in text or event spoken into the iPad, and a url generated which can be shared with the teacher, or when students are logged into their Google accounts, shared on Google+. It’s quick and entertaining when the results are played on the teacher PC via the audio system from the front of the room.
Here are some samples from my students brainstorming ideas for IELTS essays:
As mentioned above, if your students are logged on to Google they can save their stories to their Google+ accounts or they can generate a link that they can copy and paste to a shared space. One such space that is very convenient to set up is Today’s Meet, https://todaysmeet.com/. Here a “room” can be created by anyone with or without a Today’s Meet account, and no one needs an account to simply access the room and write to it just by clicking the URL. Because it does not require a login, in some circumstances, it’s an ideal collaboration tool. If “anyone” comprises a class of students, then the teacher can create a room and all students can write to it and click on any links that anyone else places there (Figure 9). Everything written there is preserved for a time, up to a month or so, plenty of time for a teacher to follow up on a class by copying links of URLs recorded there in a more permanent online space where the students can see what each other created.
Figure 9: Today’s meet for creating a common place to share on the fly links and backchannel thoughts
Word Clouds by ABCYA
One of my favorite enhancements to writing is Word Clouds, such as those produced on PC by the well known http://worldle.net. Fortunately, there is a similar app for iPad called Word Clouds (when you search the app store it shows as Word Clouds by abcya.com). With this free app, students are able to generate word clouds on the iPad.
However, until recently they would have discovered that Apple does not make it as easy for you to insert images into Google Docs as you can on a PC. It could be done on iPad, but the trick was not all that intuitive, according to Herb (2014) as recently as September of that year (as shown in Figure 10), and many others, who went on to explain the work-around.
Figure 10: Screen shot of an article showing how as late as 2014 Google Docs provided no image insert tool for iPad. However, in the course of giving my presentations at the recent ISTE conference, one of my attendees showed me that there has since been added a + function on the Docs app that looks like this (Figure 11):
Figure 11: Attendees at my ISTE workshop in Philadelphia, 2015, show me that the image insert tool for iPad had been added by then. And there you have it, easy photo insert into Docs. Before that addition to Docs functionality, you needed to bring up your Google Doc in a browser on the iPad and then avoid the invitations in the browser to revert to the app. Eventually you would arrive at the desktop version of Google Docs in your browser where you would find the familiar PC-based set of formatting tools, and where you could insert your picture.
To help others achieve the workaround, I had made screen captures of the process on my iPad and created a tutorial for how to do it at my blog (Stevens, 2015b).
This new addition makes this no longer necessary. However, it still might be useful to know how to revert to desktop view for extended functionality with Google Docs on iPad compatible with PC.
Educreations
I mention Educreations in my workshops as a tool that can help students envisage ideas and communicate them spatially and graphically, but I don’t usually spend time on it because there is usually not enough time to spend, and this app is fairly intuitive. It’s a free app that does more or less what Explain Everything does, but Explain Everything costs $2.99 which can be an impediment to students without credit cards or the willingness to use them, whereas Educreations is free. And Educreations compares well with Explain Everything, e.g. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/ipad-screencasting-educreations-and-explain-everything/38662.
According to this comparison, Educreations appears to be simpler to use at the cost of greater flexibility available with Explain Everything. Another difference is that your Educreations are hosted in the cloud, but cannot be extracted from there, whereas Explain Everything allows users ownership of products created, for upload to YouTube for example.
Here is an example of one of my first Educreations (Figure 12).
At the workshop we gave at ISTE 2015 in Philadelphia, the way I intended to allocate my time was explained here (this is for the record; in practice, pace and content of the 45 minute workshop sessions were dictated by participant interest and ability):
Engage with the presenter using the techniques described above
In time remaining, create an Educreations or Explain Everything artifact and link to it in your Google Doc.
In practice, and in order to let participants at my workshops direct the pace and flow of what they wanted to learn from what I had to offer, none of the mini-sessions I ran at ISTE followed this script in its entirety.
For a complete set of resources presented at ISTE and for more about the evolution of this workshop, see the NOTES below.
It is difficult in the fluidity of a workshop context, and perhaps unwise, to attempt to direct peer practice along such pre-conceived lines as outlined above. Many of our ISTE participants would have been aware of some of these affordances, but for many whom I have addressed in other contexts, the idea of app-smashing voice and some of the other tools mentioned into an environment to enhance student writing has been enlightening. These presentations have prompted me to learn more and to refine my techniques, and to explain them in ways that are approachable by a range of educators. For these reasons, I feel that what I have come to learn in my own practice using PCs and iPads to facilitate writing has been of benefit to some, and I am happy to share what I know here.
References
Clanfield, L. (2014). Rediscovering writing: Re-examining writing in the modern language classroom. Presentation delivered at EOI Alicante, and repeated at TESOL Arabia, Dubai in March, 2015. Available: https://app.box.com/s/0xsjv54sbh18uqx3j01a.
Crystal, D. (2008). Txtng: The gr8 db8. OUP.
Pegrum, M. (2009). From blogs to bombs: The future of digital technologies in education. Crawley, Australia: The University of Western Australia Publishing. Reading, M. (2015). Get your students developing their writing skills with Google Story Builder Using Technology Better. Available: http://usingtechnologybetter.com/google-story-builder/.
This paper was originally prepared for TESOL 2015 Toronto as part of a workshop Thursday, March 26th 3:00 – 4:30 PM in the CALL-IS Electronic Village entitlediPadagogy: A Bloomin' Better Way to Teach
presenters Dani Coelho, Ellen Dougherty, Nery Alvarado, and Vance Stevens
The slides for that presentation were revised and will be run from my iPad using the Google Slides app at TESOL 2015 in Toronto on March 26, 2015, here: http://tinyurl.com/vance2015writing
Another version of this presentation, this time a preview for ISTE, was produced on Sunday, June 7 - Learning2gether with Vance Stevens – Teaching Writing on iPad and mobile devices using Voice Tools
Yet another version of this, focusing on just the voice aspects of giving feedback on student writing has been prepared for and submitted to TESL-EJ. Entitled Finding your voice: Teaching writing using tablets with voice capability, the draft can be found here
Stevens, V. (2015). Finding Your Voice: Teaching Writing Using Tablets with Voice Capability. TESL-EJ 19 (3) 1-11. Available: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej75/int.pdf
