I was getting ready to assign my first writing project and visions of myself last year, struggling to keep track of 100 students' various drafts in various formats, came flying through my brain...
The Nightmare: (This is not for faint of heart.) Imagine, you've just graded a stack of essays or stories, but notice a staggering amount of blanks in the gradebook, from students you know have done the assignment.
You search your email for the first student's name and find an email in which she sent you her first draft. You search for another email and through your Google Docs folders, but find nothing else. You print out the draft and move on to the next student. You search his name and find a Google Doc he shared with you. You open it and print it (this takes a little whle because the computer has to convert the Doc into a printable format.) You have no first draft to compare it to, because he has updated the Google Doc. To view previous drafts, you'd have to go through draft history. No time for that. You find no emails from a third student and assign her a zero. Later, her mother emails asking why her grade is low. You explain why, only to find that she did email her 2nd draft, but from a different email address that didn;t come up when you searched her name...
Is this really my job? Just finding and printing 40 essays alone takes over an hour.
On top of this mania, the writing process in the classroom is no walk in the park either. Students save on one laptop, and the next day, we get a different laptop cart, rendreing the student unable to build on the progress. Students who write in Google Docs are immune to this problem, but the Internet goes in and out, making Google Docs unreliable as well. Another student saves on a flash drive and then forgets it at home the next day. She begins a new draft in class, only to discard it at the end of the period, in favor the better one she has at home on the flash drive. Other student carefully hand writes his first draft and then lose it, along with your feedback from a writing conference. Paralyzed, he never writes a next draft. You take pity on them and don't enter any grade for the assignment, one way or another.
***
I wrote to my friend Maia Heyck Merlin, author of The Together Teacher and organization guru, with this organizational nightmare. After I wrote to Maia with my problem, she suggested we talk on the phone. The solution would need to be customized around my needs, preferences and capabilities.
Maia was great at listening and helping me identify the pieces of the problem. She asked great questions that led us to some clear, uncomplicated structures that would create order around the drafting process, and allow me to focus on the important work of giving students feedback on their writing.
Maia has written a great post with 3 general rules for managing this issue in any classroom, called Thumbdrives, Google Docs and Long Hand, Oh My!
In my next post, I will share the specific ways I am implementing these rules in my 8th grade ELA classroom.
[image credit: tx.english-ch.com]
