To be honest, when I saw this extension for the first time, my reaction was lukewarm at best. I do believe I simply had the wrong frame of mind when I saw it. In reality, this can be a great tool…. Draftback.

First things first. Draftback is a Chrome extension that allows you to “play back” Google docs. You can pick it up HERE.

Now, here is where I have found Draftback to shine. It allows a teacher to see how a student actually creates a document. That may not seem like much, but in reality, you learn a great deal from this. Just today, my intern and I were looking at the Draftbacks of a couple student documents. We were instantly able to identify that some students did not understand how to place their cursor back in a line of text and edit it. They were deleting entire lines of text to fix one error, then retyping the rest.

Draftback uses the document’s revision history. This is a great thing for parent conferences. You can actually show the parent EXACTLY what a child did in a document for an entire class period, or over the life of the document.

I highly recommend that you grab this extension and give it a try. I think you will find it a great help in your classroom.