App review by Stephanie Trautman, Common Sense Education | Updated August 2015
Draftback

Draftback

Observe and decipher your writing process with no-frills Chrome add-on

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Not yet rated Expert evaluation by Common Sense
Grades
7–12
Subjects & Skills
English Language Arts, Communication & Collaboration
Great for
Formative Assessment
Price:  Free
Platforms:  Chrome
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Take a look inside

5 images
Users can play back a document at the actual speed at which it was written or at double speed.
Use the tool to render a "draftback" and see details of your own writing process.
This paper shows that minimal changes were made in this document.
A detail view displays document data and statistics.
The left side of the screen lets you view your place in a document.

Pros: Draftback is like watching yourself type your paper all over again in order to seek out patterns, challenges, and successful points of your writing.

Cons: The playback process could be tedious, and there's not much feedback on how to improve.

Bottom Line: A neat way to demystify the writing process, but look elsewhere for detailed guidance to improve kids' progress from draft to final product.

How Can I Teach with This Tool?

Teachers should know that users must create a document in Google Drive and do all of the editing within Google Drive in order for Draftback to pick up the edits. This is best used in a classroom that regularly uses Google and its apps.

Teachers could use Draftback on their own if they have editing permissions for students’ papers. They can watch what the student did while writing, making this a possible real-time tool to check for plagiarism or collaboration. Teachers could also require that their students watch the playback of their paper, but they should give explicit instructions about what students should look for in order to analyze their writing, a difficult task for even the best writers. This might work best on a timed writing task for an assessment, which teachers and students could revisit and use to examine and discuss how students work under time pressure.

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Standards:

Draftback is a Chrome browser add-on that tracks documents as they're created in Google Drive and renders a video playback of the document's creation in real time. The playback includes a video scrubber and allows users to pause and advance the playback with different speeds from real-time playback to two times the speed.

Draftback was created to help writers observe strengths and challenges in their writing processes. By standing back to view your document's creation in real time (or at higher speed), hopefully you'll be able to see what you need to work on. Do you need to elaborate more on certain points up front? Do you stop and think about sentences as you create them, or do you go back to them in later edits? How does your rough draft evolve into the final version? While Draftback may be most easily used for writers to review their own work, peer editors or teachers could also view the rendered playback and help students analyze their writing style and their paper's structure.

Learning about your writing process is key to becoming a fluid, sound writer, and Draftback purports to facilitate that process. Unfortunately, the app isn't especially engaging and requires some serious patience and discipline, as sitting long enough to review an entire paper being written and revised may not suit writers of all ages. This process might be especially frustrating to students whose writing process takes a great deal of time and a lot of false starts-- revisiting that process might be more discouraging that helpful. It's not especially forgiving to kids whose processes might be especially non-linear, and it's hard to envision how helpful it might be for kids to watch this process passively. 

Additionally, there's no guidance or reinforcements for learning about the writing process: There's no info or advice about best practices for brainstorming or outlining, and teachers will most likely have to help students reflect upon what they're seeing in order for them to glean insights about how their writing process is working for (or against) them.  On the plus side, writers will receive wonderful data regarding their editing, including a timeline of activity within the document (very similar to the revision history option in Google Drive), where in the document changes were made, and the span of time spent on edits. Overall, this is a neat way to observe kids' writing process, but it needs some serious scaffolding to take it beyond a one-off playback tool.

Overall Rating
Engagement

With its simplistic design, the add-on is useful, but students will have to stay actively engaged throughout the entire playback to make sure they can analyze their writing structure and style.

Pedagogy

As kids watch their papers play back, they can reflect on their writing process and observe from a more objective perspective. Tips and info about how to improve kids' writing would make this experience more active than passive.

Support

This Chrome add-on is fairly simple and straightforward to use, so help isn't really needed, but the data it provides is supportive to users.

Common Sense reviewer
Stephanie Trautman Classroom teacher
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Key Standards Supported

Writing

  • W.8.4

    Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in standards 1–3 above.)

  • W.8.5

    With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on how well purpose and audience have been addressed.

  • W.8.6

    Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently as well as to interact and collaborate with others.

  • W.8.10

    Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences.

  • W.9-10.4

    Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in standards 1–3 above.)

  • W.9-10.5

    Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience.

  • W.9-10.6

    Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically.

  • W.9-10.10

    Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

  • W.11-12.4

    Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. (Grade-specific expectations for writing types are defined in standards 1–3 above.)

  • W.11-12.5

    Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience.

  • W.11-12.6

    Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information.

  • W.11-12.10

    Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes

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