The power of online social networking to engage students and provide means for their collaboration is attractive to me as a teacher. Students who have little comfort with traditional computer applications seem to know the ins and outs of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter with confidence and pride.

I’ve long been seeking ways to allow students to critique each others’ writing and thinking work in a more meaningful forum than traditional “peer editing.” Unfortunately, standard peer editing typically becomes “peer rubberstamping” at one extreme, or “peer rewriting” at the other.

With online social tools, however, I may have found my vehicle for meaningful peer feedback. I’ve already had success with students’ using googledocs to share and collaborate on individual and group assignments. My school subscribes to the google educational apps, so each student has a school-customized googledocs account and the learning curve is very manageable. This fall, I’ve started using edmodo, which allows password-protected groups (classes, teams, etc.), assignment submission, content tagging, microblogging and commenting, and a public RSS feed. It’s my social app of choice, and it’s starting to make me doubt my elgg installation, as edmodo seems to be doing so much that I had thought I would use elgg.

Regardless of which of these tools I use with my students, I’ve evaluated each of them as usable in my classes because, among other reasons, they are all free, easy to use, and closed to the rest of the Internet. I want my students’ activities to authentic, but there are too many risks for a teacher to have students working with open social networking apps in the K-12 environment.

One lesson that I’ve considered moving from paper to online social tool is my Core Communication Skills course’s mock job interview preparation. Typically, I have students categorize the interview questions on our list into hard, medium, and easy categories. Each day I ask them to write an answer to one of the hard questions or one medium and one easy. The students struggle to get their messages of employability across, but the process helps them prepare.

Where the lesson loses its effectiveness is in the next phase, when I have students pair-share and come up with three positives and one area of improvement. Their positives are typically generic, like “you did a good job,” while I’m looking for something more like “good job turning the negative of not liking your prior boss into a positive statement about how you compromise in order to get along with your co-workers.”

Integrating social networking alone will not be enough to create depth in student critiques. In addition to using the engaging tools of edmodo, I will post a rubric for quality and quantity of feedback on my teaching website, adamswriting.com/teaching.

The combination of the social networking tool, which will open up students’ writing to more of their classmates’ eyes and critical analysis, and a clear assessment instrument (rubric) will foster improved peer editing of these important interview preparation responses.

The Particulars

Goals

• Students will approach the mock interview activity with confidence in their ability to craft effective answers and position themselves to succeed in a job search.

Lesson Objectives

• Students will craft answers to sample job interview questions in a manner that presents their strengths, maturity, and employability.
• Students will critique each other’s responses for clarity, effectiveness, and style.

Instructions

The instructions for this assignment include those posted at http://adamswriting.com/teaching/core-communications/interview/interview-preparation-and-feedback, to which students are directed from the following assignment in edmodo (click image for larger view).

Evaluation

Student responses and replies will be graded according to the criteria on the instructions link. In addition to posting their responses and replies to their classes in edmodo, students will collect them and post them as a response to the assignment posted in edmodo.

Live Sample

If you would like to sample this assignment as a student, you need these two things.

• My directions for joining edmodo. I share these with my students in a gray box halfway down this linked page. The site is very student friendly, not even requiring an e-mail address to create a new account. It will add little to nothing to your digital dossier!
• Our group code for the special group I created for this assignment is rsm053.