Rewind 7 years…

During my time teaching theoretical #Physed, I would get a number of assignments that would be sent to me via email in Word. I would never know if students had plagiarised from one another, copied off the internet (could do a quick google search to see), or copied out of a book. I would look to see if paragraphs matched the style of the rest of the assignment and you would know if some work didn’t quite fit the rest of the assignment.

Fast forward to the present day…

You have just had handed in an assignment through Google Docs and you are not too sure if all the student’s work is their own.

You could click the revision history to see if anyone had helped the student with a piece of work.

This can be done by clicking:

File -> See revision history

Or you can go to the Chrome store and download

‘Draftback’.

The download link is here: mradampe.com/draftback

The best way to describe draftback is the revision history on steroids! (Keeping with the health theme :D).

Draftback will perform an instant replay of the assignment so you can watch how the assignment was created. If you click ‘document graphs and statistics’ you will be able to see how long the piece of work took and when the majority of the assignment was completed making it the ultimate ‘spy’ tool when checking students work. Giving that instant replay of an assignment could be a very powerful teaching tool.

I have also used it when students have been collaborating on one assignment to see how long each student spent on the document.  Sharing the work load rather than one individual doing all the work. Great for teaching and learning and ensuring all students are contributing.

Give it a go and use it as part of your armoury when grading pieces of work.