Online Feedback

I am excited to use online feedback this year. I am especially interested in using virtual office hours, as suggested in the reading. I don't know why I never considered this idea before, but it is something I hope to incorporate in my class this year. My sophomores are working on their big research papers right now so I don't think I have enough time to get them on board, but next semester I think it will work. I plan to use the moodle chat feature to set up a time for writing conferences. My students are often not in the right frame of mind to discuss their writing either before school, since they'd have to get up early to see me, or after school, when they're drained from the day. I know that most of my students work on their writing pretty late at night. Since I have children, it would fit well in my schedule to conference with kids at 9 or 10 at night. I have a student whose work I recently used as a sample in my classroom. She is a decent writer, but has trouble with some awkward sentence constructions and word usage. I think it would be very helpful for me to insert comments right into her writing so that she could get a better understanding of the problems in her writing. Many of my students don't fully understand my comments of "awk" in the margins. Even if they know that it stands for awkward, they don't know how to reconstruct their sentences. Any extra conference time I can get with them is helpful. Both virtual conferencing, and inserting comments on writing will provide the specific feedback that my students need.