Analyzing your own writing with a critical eye can be hard to do. I know, I try to do it every day and I still miss things that a fresh set of eyes quickly picks up. Like me, students often struggle to critically analyze their own writing. Peer editing is one solution to that problem. Another solution is to use an online writing checker the one that JoeZoo offers as a Google Docs Add-on. JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker is a customizable tool that students can use to evaluate their own written work and teachers, of all subjects, to save a lot of time assessing student work.
Five Key Features of JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker
- JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker is a part of the JoeZoo Google Docs Add-on that you can get right here. Once it is installed you can begin customizing how it works for you and your students.
- You can pick the spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules that you want the Monkey Checker to identify. Many services will identify all errors, but if you want students to be responsible for self-identifying small errors and let Monkey Checker identify the bigger errors, you can have it do that. Or you can use the customizations to set different rules for different classes. For example, I might have Monkey Checker flag all errors for my ninth grade students and only have it flag bigger errors for my eleventh grade students.
- Many grammar, spelling, and punctuation checkers will automatically fix errors for students. Monkey Checker only suggests corrections. I like that because it forces students to look at their mistakes and make corresponding corrections.
- Errors are color coded within Google Docs. Errors of the same type are color coded and grouped for easy identification by students and teachers. This makes it easy to quickly identify the type of mistake that a particular student makes most often.
- The Monkey Checker tracks students’ self-editing progress and reports that information to teachers in a word cloud format.
Want to see these features in action? Watch this short video to see how you and your students can benefit from using JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker for Google Docs.
Bonus item!
- An originality checker is built into JoeZoo’s Monkey Checker. Sometimes students don’t intend to do it, but they end up including too much of another person’s work in their own papers. The originality checker lets teachers instantly check if a student copied any part of their work from other students in the class
Disclosure: JoeZoo is an advertiser on this blog. That said, I was writing about JoeZoo and including it in workshops long before they started advertising.
