Google Docs “Writing to Learn” Activity

I created a fresh Google Docs page with a few prompts, and shared it with all my journalism students.

After a few minutes, they started to flesh it out with responses. The different-colored cursors represent where each student was working in the document.

The energy level was very high. I delivered a running commentary… “Good call, changing ‘extraneous’ to ‘superfluous,’ Stephanie,” or “Elisa, that was a great idea, introducing the concept of credibility.”

Just three minutes after the first screen shot, the document had really taken off.

The bottom half of the document was mostly an additive list, but students collaborated on a definition of “news” in the top part of the document, where I saw a lot of productive give-and-take.