August eTip: Reimagining the Writing Process Using Microsoft Tools

Hi everyone! We hope you've had a great eLearning week and welcome back to another month's sharing of eTip! For this month's eTip, we have Magdalena to share with us how we can use OneNote for a friction-less collaboration as well as communicating feedback and review!

Aren't you interested? Cause we are! Read on!

Part 1: Setting Assignments

You can start by creating a OneNote Class notebook to share with your students. The Class Notebook allows you to share all content related to the course/assignment in one place. Therefore, you can quickly post an existing Word document to OneNote detailing the writing assignment as well as the rubric you will use to assess the student's final product. Additionally, you can send all or a part of your instructions in the content library to every student with the “Distribute Content” feature in the Class Notebook add-in. By posting the assignment in the content library of your OneNote Class Notebook, you have no worries that students may lose the assignment. They can access it anytime, anywhere.

Part 2: Ideation

Often, students struggle with knowing how to express their thoughts or where to start. One tool that will help students to get started with brainstorming is the Dictation feature found in Learning Tools for OneNote. With the dictation tool, students simply speak and OneNote does the typing.  Once a student has used the dictate function to summarise what she has learnt, she can move on to her research portion to gather more resources for the assignment.

Part 3: Frictionless Collaboration

If a writing project requires collaboration, Real Time Collaboration in Word is a wonderful tool for students. Because the document is on Office 365, students can access the document anytime, anywhere with their phone, tablet, or computer - even offline.

Even when students are in the same room working on the document at the same time, they can see where their peers are working and what changes they are making as they happen. That means no more worries of two students modifying the same section differently!

Part 4: Revisions

Once they have a draft of their composition, it is important for students to step back and reflect on what they have done so far and begin the revision process. Using a digitized stylus, students can make changes to their document directly in Word, saving paper and time. You can delete a sentence, or even a paragraph with a stroke of a pen!

Part 5: Review/Feedback

When students share their Word documents with you via Office 365, you can make suggestions with the track changes and comment features in Word. Track changes is a helpful way to show students how to fix a grammatical error, while comments allows you to explain the grammatical error so that they can fix the same error in other places in their paper, or in the future.

In addition to track changes and comments, inking in OneNote and Word is a useful way to provide feedback for my students. With a digitized stylus, you can provide feedback quickly just as if the students had printed the paper and given you a hard copy. For multiple revisions, inking allows you to provide symbols and notes regarding items to improve.

Finally, a great tool for providing feedback is the Insert Audio feature in OneNote. Without the audio feature in OneNote, to conference with students about their writing, you have to meet with each student to discuss strengths and weaknesses in their papers. Not only is the process time consuming (spanning over multiple days), students frequently admit that they forget some of the feedback, requiring a second meeting. With Insert Audio feedback feature, however, you are able to have mini conferences with each student at the same time by adding audio feedback directly on the page. Students then listen to their audio feedback, while you mill around the room and answer questions they may have. Students can also replay the feedback as many times as needed.

Part 6: Proofing

After review and feedback, students will, of course, conduct a final proofing of their paper on their own. Microsoft has a tool that can put teachers and students at ease regarding errors like grammatical, spelling or stylistic errors. Editor in Word offers students a virtual assistant for their writing. When students see an error on the page, they can accept the suggestion that Editor provides. They can also learn about their error by selecting the "See More" option. When they select the "See more" feature, they learn more about their error and how to fix it. In short, Editor is much more advanced than your typical spelling and grammar checker.

Now that you have seen a repertoire of tools that work seamlessly together to help you and your students in the writing process, think of an assignment that could be improved with these tools. How will you improve that assignment for your students?