WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
At the beginning of this year (3 commitments for 2007) I promised to focus on ’sharing good practice and my thoughts on improving education’, radical transparency ‘to help change the education system for the 21st century’, and to spread the word. Here’s a post about coursework that hopefully ticks each box! 
Despite the ongoing problems with the school network, I decided that my Year 10 GCSE History students were going to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to complete their coursework. This, I believe is Coursework 2.0 - but to understand what I mean by this, I need to explain what Coursework 1.0 and Coursework 1.5 amount to…
Coursework 1.0
This is coursework before the computer age. It involved drafts which would be submitted to the teacher which would then be annotated with guidance given. In order for a student to improve on that answer and submit a second draft most, if not all, of the work would have be re-written by hand.
Whilst this may have had benefits for imbibing knowledge in terms of rote learning, it was hardly the most efficient use of the time of students (or teachers). Although there are always potential problems surrounding plagiarism when it comes to coursework, in the Coursework 1.0 world it was a lot easier to go undetected. Google, after all, was not your friend… 
Coursework 1.5
The 1990s saw the birth of Coursework 1.5 - the use of word-processors to replace pen-and-paper. This enabled feedback to be given initially on printed drafts of work. Students could then go back to the original document they had saved and make the changes/improvements suggested by the teacher.
Later, from around 1997 onwards, some students started bringing their work in on floppy disk. This has evolved into emailing teachers directly and/or using a USB flash drive to transport their data. (*Just as a sidenote, I believe all schools should be giving these out to students as a matter of course.*)
The benefits were that the focus was on the construction of coursework answers, rather than on the mechanical process of writing it. Problems remained, however, in terms of filetypes of documents, of data corruption and of both teachers and students having to wait for the other to finish with the document before they added more.
Coursework 2.0
What I’ve been trying to introduce my students to, then, is what could be dubbed ‘Coursework 2.0′. I’m using Google Docs & Spreadsheets via the free Google Accounts for which anyone can sign up. Of course, if you (or your students) use GMail account, you already have one of these. This was the first step towards Coursework 2.0. This would be a lot easier in forward-thinking schools like Dave Stacey’s, where all students from next year will be given such accounts, but branded by the school under the free Google Apps for Education scheme. 
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Using Google Docs students can create documents and use a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) interface similar to that of Microsoft Word circa its 1997 iteration. So long as you don’t want to do mail merges, labels or anything fancy, it’s great as it’s straightforward. And, yes, it’s got a spell checker built in!
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The magic comes, however, when you click the ‘Add collaborators’ button. This means that you can choose to have others be able to edit (or only to view) your document. You simply type in an email address and the other person is notified of their new privileges on your document. I got my students to invite me to be able to edit their documents, which means I can give feedback very quickly. I simply write in green (there’s a comment function) and they delete it once they’ve done it. If they make any mistakes their work is constantly saved, and there’s a revision history for if they want to restore a previous iteration.
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In my home page for Google Docs I am able to view all the documents to which I have access.
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It tells me when they were last accessed, or if I prefer, I can view an RSS feed (?) of modifications to the documents (go to Settings/RSS Feeds and change the option Private documents in public feeds to Allow, then subscribe to the RSS feed on your Google Docs home page)
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Finally, students can print their work off directly once it is complete and they have performed a word count, or save their work in a number of formats - including Microsoft Word, OpenOffice and PDF!
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I think it’s a step forward: what do you think?
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This is fantastic Doug, I've been thinking for a while there must be a better of getting and commenting on coursework. The experiences with moodle have led to just as many (if not more) problems that with printed copies but this will be fantastic. I've been playing arund the with the sharing feature in google spreadsheets today, I'll try and blog about it, just as soon as I've finihed these reports!
I have been using Google docs this year for private classes. It works well for students who do not want expose on the Internet or work that was not meant to be read by a larger audience.
For the group at school, I feel wikispaces is better. The magic is that peer revision of written work happens before my own corrections and -believe or not- peer observations tend to be more demanding than the teacher's!
Exactly, Claudia - the two serve different purposes. I just can't have them displaying their coursework publicly, so Google Docs provides another effective method. For homeworks, etc. and knowledge-creation relevant to the course, we do have a wikispaces wiki!
won't this leave the way open for accusations of helping candidates too much. in my school ive been told that anything but the most general comments (verbal- in class) are acceptable. i'm an nqt so i'm not sure how it's done elswhere.
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Winston, don't worry - you're allowed to give written feedback on coursework! The good thing about Google Docs is that every revision is saved (much like a wiki) so if you were accused of giving too much help, there'd be evidence to back up your defence.
What do you do when you have lots of students - like 200! Do you manually enter their email addresses or is there a faster or (nearly) automatic way of collecting their addresses?
Tim, they sign up and then invite me to view their work!
"""Winston, don't worry - you're allowed to give written feedback on coursework! The good thing about Google Docs is that every revision is saved (much like a wiki) so if you were accused of giving too much help, there'd be evidence to back up your defence. """
then you don't have a HOD like mine - very strict on any fback. verbal only as far as they are concerned.