Wrotevote

Wrotevote is a game where class members vote on their favourite checkpoint responses in a lesson.

It has an element of surprise and competition that makes feedback reinforcing.

We strongly suggest you use Wrotevote.

When there are enough responses submitted for a Wrotevote-enabled lesson, students will be able to click through to Wrotevote from their class overview page, selecting the specific lesson they want to play with from the dropdown.

Students can see how many votes their responses have received, and which lessons have responses they can vote on.

Students are shown a pair of anonymous responses and click the one they like best.

Wrotevote voting

When a student votes on a response, they get to see who wrote it, and can write a comment or leave an emoji (which will be posted to the response feed in the lesson).

Wrotevote reaction

After five votes, students land on a dashboard where they can see how the voting is going.

This dashboard changes as more votes come in.
Students can complete more voting rounds if they want, until there are no more available checkpoint pieces.

Wrotevote dashboard

If a lesson has checkpoint pieces, only the checkpoint pieces will be used in the game.

In lessons such as Mixed Remix, where there are no checkpoint pieces, Wrotevote uses all the textbox submissions.

We've tried to reinforce good performance without demotivating those students who don't pick up many votes.

To this end, we don't show rankings. Instead, we:

highlight the winners
point out when a student is in the top 25% or top 50%, and
highlight a student's most popular reply (along with other popular replies in the class).

Wrotevote is effective because:

It encourages members to read and respond to each other's writing.
It captures some of the benefits of competition while minimising the harms.
It emphasises positive reinforcement while minimising the kind of feedback that would be demotivating (such as seeing yourself on the bottom of a leaderboard).
It reinforces the social aspect of writing.

Its biggest weakness is that it is not systematic.

The element of randomness and surprise also means that all results need to be taken with a grain of salt, because you can never be sure who saw what snippet, in what combination.

So when you use Wrotevote, encourage students to:

enjoy the highs
put disappointments down to randomness
learn from the winners, and
maintain a healthy desire to improve personal performance.

Wrotevote will activate as soon as there are enough responses. Enthusiastic students might dive straight in.

Students can play as many rounds as they like, until they run out of pairs to review.

You might want to support this enthusiasm because it can make the activity appealing to other students and encourage them to complete the lesson, or you might want to tell class members when you want them to start playing.

For example you might want to let them play whenever they feel like, or play at specified times; play by themselves, or play as a group.

Teaching with Writelike