Saturday, June 22, 2013

Late Night Chats on Google Docs

I had my first experience this week of talking to a student on a Google doc late at night.
I had set my tutor class their blog homework this week to write about respect. I always give them them the option to send their homework to me either via an email or a shared Google doc. The deadline as always was midnight on Thursday ( so that it gives me Friday to kill them if they don't do it..!! ).
This Thursday was the night of the big thunder storm, so at 11.10 I was still up on the couch, browsing about on the net. An email came though that one of my class had shared a doc so I clicked on it to do my usual copy and paste onto their class blog. Link here.
When I opened the doc, Caroline was still writing on it, so I went further down the page and sent her a little comment. This opened the door to half an hour of back and forth fun. It was nothing educational but I found out where she lives and the fact that she has to get the train in every day. We had a joke about me expecting being paid for things in chocolate or pictures of Johnny Depp. ( Can you believe she didn't know who he was!!!..I soon put that right ! ). We then reached an agreement that as this was the first week that the the whole group had hit the deadline we would celebrate with a fish and chips shared lunch.
Like I said, nothing educational and if this had been a piece of work where the doc had to be marked, then I would have used the comments down the side. As I copy and paste the relevant bits onto their blogs, I wasn't bothered about typing directly onto her page.
It was an interesting insight into when the students are online doing their work and that they appreciate a bit of back and forth feedback, educational or not.

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