Peer Editing Blog Entries

Yesterday, I did a tutorial with the students on peer editing, which can be found here. It was a little bit elementary for them, but I explained that it was already online so we would just overlook the middle school style format. It was actually fine, but I didn't want them to feel like it was talking down to them. I skipped parts of it to make it more streamlined. If I was going to do one myself, I would pare it down a bit. Partly that's because I do mini-lessons that need to be pretty quick and partly because they don't usually stay with the lesson for more than 20 minutes. I had them take notes on the peer editing format and enter it in a blog post so that they can go back and review it whenever we do peer editing.

Today, I had them go into other students blogs and do some peer editing. They left the editing comments in the comments section of the other person's blog post. They seemed to do a pretty good job although some of them probably have a little trouble actually figuring out what is wrong with another post. The good thing is that most of them are able to find someone either on their level or below their level of writing so that they can actually see the mistakes. Those who are at a higher writing level are quite a bit harder for some of the students to edit because their mistakes are less obvious and sometimes they don't really have mistakes, although they might be able to edit for content or add to it to make it better.

I was impressed with their ability to be kind and remember not to make others feel bad. I was afraid they might forget that in their effort to find corrections. Sometimes it is easier to focus on the mistakes than on the good things in someone's writing, but they did an excellent job of balancing both sides.