One of our favourite new additions to Writelike is Wrotevote, a fun way to review, rate and comment on other users in your group. It encourages group members to read each other’s work and provide feedback.
How does it work?
If you’re a moderator, you can organise a Wrotevote activity with your group as the culmination of a lesson. It’s available to all group lessons by default. When enough members have completed passages within that lesson, Wrotevote can begin!
You’re provided two random, anonymous snippets from group members (never your own), with the instructions and inspiration image that went with that activity.
Compare the two snippets and vote for your favourite. Once a snippet has been selected, the author is revealed and you can provide additional comments and reactions.
After five rounds of voting have been completed, you’ll see results on the leaderboard! Your group can have more voting rounds, too – if so, the results are updated automatically.
At the end of voting, you’ll see:
- the five most popular passages
- your most popular passage
- if your writing was in the top 50 / 25 / 10 percent of votes
Fun and informal peer review
We’ve worked hard to make this game fun and rewarding, and not demotivating for struggling students. The idea is to highlight good writing in the class, and to give students the reinforcement of a hard-won reaction or comment from a peer.
One more thing: Students shouldn’t read too much into it because Wrotevote isn’t systematic. Each student sees only a handful of snippets, and the pairings can mean sometimes the best snippets are paired together, so only one of the best snippets gets a vote, and the other misses out. So treat this as fun and light, and partly luck of the draw.
While not part of formal assessment, the aim of Wrotevote is to create a fun, informal way to encourage good writing, peer review, and group discussion.
Give it a try in your next group lesson and let us know what you think!