I recently learned about a Chrome extension called Draftback. It will playback all of the revisions made to a google doc as a movie. It will also create graphs that show how the revision of the document has progressed over time.
On one hand, this is a very cool way to look at how documents we write (or kids write) actually come into being. It shows every keystroke (slowly or quickly - you choose the speed) that created the finished product.
On the other hand, Draftback can be used to look at document creation of potentially dubious origin. If you suspect a student copy and pasted research into his research paper, you can watch it happen in Draftback.
Draftback will also create a graph of the creation of the work, showing times and dates of revision as well as the position on the document. Here's a screenshot of what that graph looks like.
You can imagine how valuable a graph like this would be to help students understand their own writing process (and to help us look at our own).
Draftback is a Chrome extension available for free here.
If you'd like to read more about it, here's an article.
Let me know if you'd like help getting started using this very cool tool.
Interesting documentation of a creative process- may be informative to the creator- re: habits; may be dangerous when used as a weapon at a student
ReplyDeleteAgreed. It's an awesome tool to look at things that we otherwise can't see. The graph takes some thinking, but once I figured it out, I thought it might be more valuable than the movie of the revisions. I would love to see a poet or a short story writer use it.
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