Sometimes, though, you just want to get input on something you've written or have a peer check it over for spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes. If you share your Google Doc in the usual way with full editing rights, your editor can wind up changing your original work to an extent that it's hard for you to tell why changes were made or even what changes were made. You could use revision history, but that can be tedious if a lot of edits were made.
Using Suggesting Mode
To get input on a Google Doc you own while retaining ultimate control of the edits, you can use Suggesting Mode. The key to using Suggesting Mode is to share the document with Can Comment rights instead of Can Edit rights. The demonstration I put together below shows how to share the document as well as how Suggesting Mode works.
As part of the tutorial, I also elaborate on the following uses of Suggesting Mode in the classroom:
- Editing practice: General editing or focus on frequent mistakes you’re seeing in student writing
- Peer editing: essays, lab write-ups, history research, descriptions of math processes
- Teacher/student writing conferences
- To learn or review material: Provide students with inaccurate notes or information in a Google Doc and have them Fact Check and correct it using suggesting mode.
- The Fact Check idea was sparked by this Edutopia article on alternative note taking strategies: https://goo.gl/1Dh1T3
I hope the demonstration below is helpful. If you think of more ways to use suggesting mode in teaching and learning, please share them in the comments below.
All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Please see specifics on my re-use policy before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.
