MS Word editing tools
right now, i am SWAMPED with theses. i have 13 thesis students finishing up their master’s degree this summer and i am responsible for facilitating the writing process for each student. for the life of me, i can’t seem to get caught up. i think i am close and more arrive. i am scheduled to fly to colorado for some R&R shortly into august, so i hope the students all finish by the end of the semester.
in any regard, i wanted to briefly discuss a tool that i am using with all 13 students that really speeds up the process of editing and revising and even simplifies and tidies my comments to students. i use the editing tools built into MS Word, which i have been using for the past 6 or 7 years. everyone with Word has these tools already at their disposal. for a class like a thesis class, i can’t imagine the old fashioned way being preferred by any student over the editing tools in Word. and, i can’t imagine a professor preferring the old fashioned way once getting used to the Word editing tools. here’s a screen shot of how it looks on my Mac:
i should mention that a few of my students are not ed tech students because our counseling program had an overload, which explains the snippet in the image.
anyway, you can see that any new text i add appears as blue text in the paper (see text on the left). any text i delete is removed and placed in a red box on the right. and, any comments i add are placed in the black box. students can quickly accept all of my recommended edits and the paper cleans up instantly. better yet, no student is forced to decipher my handwriting ever again. half of the time, i can’t read what i’ve written, so this solution of typing my comments is far, far superior to the old fashioned way. plus, i don’t have to worry about running out of space as the Word solution will allow me to add as much as i want.
to turn on the editing toolbar, you merely need to choose the following Menu items: View > Toolbars > Reviewing. the toolbar looks like this:
i click Track Changes when i start reviewing a paper and everything i do gets recorded as shown in the first image. amazing technology that has made my facilitator role much more productive and meaningful for my students.
now, if only i could find a tool that would read and edit papers for me . . .
Tags: Microsoft Word, Reviewing, Toolbars, editing, thesis, grading
July 25th, 2006 at 11:51 am
Hi Sean,
Cool post. I’ve been using Word editing features for many of the same reasons you cite here. One added bonus that you probably already thought of: when students turn in work electronically, it generates a nice body of student examples for future tenure portfolios.
So here’s my only question: how do you get your name listed along with your comments? Can’t seem to figure this one out . . .
July 25th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Robert, I didn’t do that on purpose, but I’ve figured out that it is inserting my name from the preferences in Word under User Information.
I can’t post a screenshot in comments, but here’s a link to one — Of course, I am on a Mac, so no guarantees that this is as easy on a PC. ;~)
Glad to hear you’re using these tools since you probably get far more papers than I do. I really only use it with my thesis students, but it sure works great in that environment.