Whether your Signature Course carries the Writing Flag or not, feedback and revision are central to the development of your students’ writing skills. The University Writing Center has compiled their experience providing online writing consultations via Zoom into two short, practical videos, one showing how to use Zoom for student writing conferences and the other covering Zoom’s breakout rooms and peer review. In each video, the UWC’s Interim Director Alice Batt demonstrates techniques that will be useful in any student conference situation.
Optimizing Zoom for Student Writing Conferences
- How to schedule and start a student meeting in Zoom, including preference settings to streamline the process
- Audio and video set up for conferencing, including how to record the session
- Ways to update your settings to speed up the meeting setup process
- How and why to use chat (saving the chat, sharing links, file transfer)
- Screensharing, so you can see a student’s work, and they can see documents you want to share
- How to use Zoom’s annotations feature, and enable shared-screen saving so the student can retain work done in the conference
- Viewing options within the Zoom session
- Using chat to share files and links, and as a workaround (if your video freezes or audio cuts out)
- Screensharing options, including why it’s preferable for the student to share and control the document being discussed
- A review of snnotations (different views for the document sharer versus the viewer), their limitations, and how to save them
- Using track changes during the consultation, either alone or in conjunction with Zoom annotations
Using Zoom Breakout Rooms to Support Writing Instruction
- Creating peer groups: randomly at the start of class, or by pre-assigning students to rooms
- How to create and upload a .csv file of email addresses to quickly set up peer review groups
- “Believing-doubting” activity for groups (two to three people) to practice summary and critique
- “What I heard/What I wonder” activity for groups (two to three people) to develop proposals or early-stage papers
- Steps for running an online peer review of full-draft papers
- Using Canvas discussion in conjunction with Google Docs to facilitate paper sharing and peer review posting
- Sample/suggested guiding questions for students to use during peer review
- Steps for running a focused peer review, reviewing shorter pieces of writing, with more instructor supervision
- Using Google Docs to create a shared depository of work to be reviewed
- Using Google Doc edits to capture students’ feedback during the session
We also offer these general guidelines to help you convert the feedback and revision components of your class for online instruction:
- Take advantage of different interactive methods – audio, visual, and print – to work with students in the way that is most practical and engaging for all of you. You can change or add methods to work around technological problems or accommodate student learning styles.
- Coordinate with students to capture information from feedback sessions. This can be done via saved chats, video capture of a conference, saved annotations, and other methods. Having a record of their feedback to refer to will aid students during revision.
- Explore different ways to share screens, files, and sources, so you have multiple options in any given setting.
- Give your students some choice and control over these options. They are the best judges of what works or doesn’t work for them in an online learning environment.
The Center for the Skills & Experience Flags is available to assist with the writing elements of your Signature Course. Please contact us to schedule a consultation by phone, Zoom, or email. We look forward to hearing from you!