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Grading: Compare Google Docs Versions using Version History

Students are writing across the curriculum - essays in English, papers in Social Studies, and lab reports in Science.    For any significant piece of writing, teachers usually provide students with valuable feedback to better their written assignments.

Grading written work with feedback:

Grading these assignments can be confusing.   It can be challenging to determine what changes the student made (if any) to improve the writing.   Many teachers like to have students turn in a 'rough draft,' give feedback with comments, and then have the students resubmit 'final' drafts.  Sometimes, teachers do this within the same document, while others have separate documents.

If you face this problem, here is a solution you might want to use!

If you use one document as both 'rough draft' and 'final draft.'  

If you like to use one document to see the comment threads, you may already know you can click File>See Version History to view how the document was created and edited, and by whom. 



Selecting See Version History provides a sidebar.  You can select any time frame during Doc construction, and you will see the changes to the Doc from the previous version.  

Or, you could use DraftBack to create a video of the history along with a report, as discussed in a recent blog post.  

But, hunting and pecking through the different versions takes time! 

Did you notice you can also select Version History and Name current Version?  


As part of the student's grade (or you could do this yourself), you could ask them to name their rough draft version 'Rough Draft.'  Now, without hunting and pecking, you can identify precisely what the student's rough draft looked like, and even restore that version if you want to!


This feature allows you to compare documents by printing one version and looking at the other on your screen.  

Alternatively, if you prefer paper grading, you could restore the 'rough draft' and print it.  Then restore the 'final draft' and print it.  Now you can grade with the rough draft by your side. 

Party bonus - the comment history is preserved when you restore it!



You can always restore the 'final' version whenever you wish!

How else might you use this?

Remember your Course Expectations from a month ago?  Many teachers and staff have these types of documents uploaded to their public website.  Instead of 'Making a copy' of this document year after year, updating the document, then updating the web page link, simply name your current version the school year.  Make changes as desired.  If you ever need to revisit your course expectations from previous years, it is easy to find the appropriate version without having to locate a separate document!

Alternatively, if you are a staff member, naming your file versions allows you to minimize the number of documents you need to look through while preserving the historical content of the text should you need to look back.  

I hope this overlooked tool helps you more effectively grade student work, and make better use of your time with your support documents!




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