Teachers' Guide

1. How long does it take to do this program?
    
2. Why should the students write their report in another program?
    
3. What should I do if my lessons are 1 hour long?
     
4. Can I get my students to just do part of the report?
    
5. Can this program give feedback on any report?
    
6. What feedback do students give about this program?
    
7. How does the program work?

 

Answers:

1. How long does it take to do this program?
   It depends on the level of your students and their prior experience with reports. Generally, good groups can do it in 2 hours and less able ones in 3 hours.
     
2. Why should the students write their report in another program?
   For realism and convenience.
   Realism because reports are usually written in a word processor, using features such as spell check and grammar check.
   Convenience because the word processor document can be saved to disk or e-mailed to the student's account so it can be worked on later.
     
3. What should I do if my lessons are 1 hour long?
   Spend 1 hour on the input documents such as the contract and the videos. Have the students take notes into their word processor or onto paper, so that they can use them in their report later. This can be done in normal classrooms with your laptop, or in a multimedia lab.
     
   Students can then either write the report for homework, accessing the site over the Internet, or in the following lesson.
     
   They can submit their reports and get feedback from the program in or out of class. Then they can revise their reports and re-submit them to see whether the problems are solved.
     
   Then students can either bring print-outs to class for the teacher to review, e-mail them to the teacher or submit them via Moodle.
     
   The teacher's feedback can be via e-mail, Moodle, or in class.
     
4. Can I get my students to just do part of the report?
   Yes, just tell them to ignore the feedback under organisation and content which states that parts of the report are missing.
    
5. Can this program give feedback on any report?
   Yes, but it expects to receive an report relevant to the situation in the videos and documents, so it will complain that some things are missing. It will still give comments on grammar errors etc.
    
6. What feedback do students give about this program?
   Over 80% give positive feedback. Of the remainder, almost all are Neutral. Based on the students' feedback, a number of changes have been made to improve the program.
    
7. How does the program work?
   From years of teaching report writing the project team have built up a list of common errors that Hong Kong students make in report writing. This program checks for about 60 of those errors.  The program does not contain an exhaustive grammar checker, and students should use the grammar and spelling checkers in their word processors in the same way that they would when writing a real report. A separate CILL web page, the Error Detector, includes this common-grammar-errors-checking function, and a list of common grammar errors it checks for.

 

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