The digital learning diary

Finnish teacher Liisi Vesikko uses collaborative software as a digital learning diary to support and improve her students’ writing skills and to assess their writing in an iterative manner.

Summary

 Liisi Vesikko’s students make an entry in the diary in their native language at the end of every week. The teacher then analyses the grammar, content and complexity of their sentences, and leaves comments and feedback to the online document. Through this iterative process, students improve their grammar, reflect on what they learned during the week, learn to express their thoughts and feelings in writing, as well as how to use a collaborative office tool. As the same document is used, students witness their improvement in the course of the semester. Feedback is never lost or forgotten, because students can always go back to what feedback they received earlier, and easily apply what they learned.

 

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Keywords

Native language, writing, grammar, metacognition, self-reflection

Quick reference
Objectives
Assess the digital learning diary of students and provide feedback to improve their self-reflection, grammar, and written expression skills.
Country
Finland
Subject
Mother tongue/Literature
Prerequisites
1 computer/student, stable internet connection
Implementation level
Intermediate
Target group age
13-15
Digital tools

MS Word online or any online collaborative text editor

DFA tool
Collaborative software, E-portfolio/Digital diary
Duration
30 min per week

Context

Keeping a learning diary is very effective in making students deeply reflect on what they have learned. Teacher Liisi Vesikko from the School of Suupanniitty started a digital learning diary project with her students, in which she asks them to fill an online learning diary at the end of each week, which she then reviews, assesses writing skills and provides feedback.

The learning goals are based on the Finnish National Core Curriculum, seeking to leverage student understanding of writing as a form of communication and self-expression. The aim of the digital learning diary is to develop and assess the skills of students’ text production with the help of teacher feedback. In this activity, the teacher provides opportunities for self-reflection and assessment. ICT is a part of fluent text production.

During the school year, a typical way to assess writing is done by assessing 3 to 5 individual texts. Producing one text takes about 3 to 4 hours of planning and writing. The teacher is usually involved in the sketching, which is about planning and developing a concept for writing. In contrast, the summative assessment focuses only on completed texts. The learning diary is also in common use when examining literature (i.e. novels) but then the focus of the assessment is on the interpretation of the literature.

“My role as a teacher is to aid and encourage students to plan a realistic and personally suitable sketch for their writing process” says teacher Liisi. By using digital learning diary, students can rehearse their writing skills with an ongoing writing project where the teacher can help and assess students’ progress as well.

During summative assessment, the teacher also makes a formative assessment by providing feedback on where the student has succeeded and may have more work ahead in the future. 

Figure 1 Teacher Liisi gives feedback to Aleksi’s phrase. She combines encouragement and direction: “… to maintain this positive development, now you should add more context to your writing.”

The activity

At the beginning of each learning module, students receive a task to start drafting notes for the digital learning diary, which is used solely to rehearse writing and the subject is the past weeks’ learning experiences. Although the content of the writing will be related to learning different subjects, the focus will rather be on the writing itself.
Each student creates their own diary on MS Word online named “The Diary” and shares a link to the diary with the teacher by email. Teacher Liisi uses MS Word Online as the platform for the diaries because her school uses MS Office 365 tools, but any collaborative software can be used here.

At the end of each week, students write half a page about the events of the week and what sort of feelings and thoughts they have about what they learned and experienced. Before the next writing session, the teacher visits each diary and leaves comments and remarks about the text and writing. 

The teacher gives feedback by selecting the text and clicking the right mouse button that opens the commenting tools. After that, the students can see her comments as a speech bubble on the right side of the document. “I find this really easy, efficient and helpful for both the teacher and student.” says Liisi. “This way the tracking is easy, and commenting is intuitive.”

Teacher Liisi gives an example: “One of my students (let us call him Aleksi) wrote about his week: ‘The past week has been easy and light. Over the weekend and the shorter school week I could rest, and this really paid off. It helped me work harder compared to previous weeks which were much harder personally. […] I am really satisfied because I´ve been improving in my writing. Honestly, that was one of my major objectives for this year.’ Then, I added my comments that were shown on the right column: “Practice makes perfect! Your text production has clearly improved compared to last week. To maintain this positive development, now it would be suitable to add more context to your writing.”

“My role as a teacher is to provide comments to each student’s digital learning diary.” explains teacher Liisi. “Students also have the opportunity for one-on-one discussions with me if they feel they want to talk about my comments and how they could make use of this commentary in their future writing.”

“Ultimately, my assessment focuses on grammar and writing itself but also how the students enhance their writing based on my comments. We go through this cycle multiple times. For example, in the previous example with “Aleksi”, I have worked with his text production for weeks. I tried to both encourage and give input for further improvements. Needless to say, this iterative process also influences my teaching and how I regulate and develop my assessment, teaching practices and interaction with my students."

This digital learning diary task has been part of a remote learning module during COVID-19 and each student had their own computer and/or mobile device available. Students usually work with computers quite a lot. However, due to COVID-19, they have been working with remote means even more intensively. 

“If this task was to be transferred to a normal school routine, it would have to be delivered as a homework once per week, or the teacher should have computers available at school during the last classes of the week.”

Outcomes and lessons learned

It is challenging to maintain a certain learning awareness among students, regarding their level of learning and learning gaps. When starting a new text, it is quite common that students do not remember the past feedback they received. By writing their own learning diary, students may revisit the feedback they had received earlier.

Another challenge is finding the time. Reviewing each student’s text takes a lot of time. Liisi recommends this sort of task with one class at a time (approx. 20 students).

Teacher Liisi saw a clear impact of her method. “Quite soon my students began to show positive results in their fluency of text production. For the students, it was easier to learn from teacher feedback right before the next writing task. This way students could remember where they still might develop their skills compared to more traditional feedback and assessment methods that usually occur at the end of a learning module or course.”

“I realised that teaching how to write for a heterogeneous group of students requires this sort of iterative and sequenced work. From my experience, it is not efficient to simultaneously teach 20 students when they are at very different levels of writing skills. While some are still trying to learn the basics, others may already be able to produce good and coherent text. Using digital methods to provide detailed and individual feedback supports students’ learning at different levels of skills and learning.”

This method has great potential. If students have their own personal devices at school, this activity can also be done as blogging – for instance, students can write posts in a blog or digital portfolio after they have completed a module/project.