Peer writing

This lesson idea takes students through an activity using a wiki for process writing and peer correction.
Learners write a short essay/story in a wiki. Their peers will then edit this text before the versions are compared and a final version is produced.
Before the lesson

Create a wiki site using pbwiki.com (see tutorial in Set up your own wiki resource).  When creating your wiki you will need to have as many group pages as there are learners in your class (although you can pair them or put them in groups of three if you wish). You will also need a writing task for participants to complete. This could be an IELTS-style writing question, the start to a short story or anything that will enable your learners to write a few paragraphs.

In the lesson

1. Give learners a number on a piece of paper. This is the group number for the page they should visit to write their essay.
2. Learners log on to the wiki using the invite key and go to the wiki page for their group.
3. Explain what you would like your learners to write. Set a reasonable time limit (10 - 15 minutes) and ask them to write the first draft individually at their computers. After ten minutes ask learners to save the page and return to the home page.
4. Everyone now gets another number. Learners open this group's page. They must now make any changes they think are necessary to make the text grammatical and lexically more correct. Encourage them to expand on the text to make it more interesting (i.e. focus on engaging the reader as well as just accuracy). Learners save the page, which will save a new version of the page (necessary for viewing the “history” in the next step).
5. Repeat this process, redistributing numbers. This time they are editing someone's work that has been already edited once. Learners should be encouraged to look at the history function of the wiki to see what changes have already been made. Don't forget to ask them to save their work when they have made their changes.
6. Ask learners to return to their original text and spend time looking at the changes that have been made by looking through the history of revisions.
7. The learner is now in the position to produce a final version.

http://courses.britishcouncil.org/pub/learningtechnologies/file.php/15/Tutorials/pbwiki2-peerwriting_demo_090422.htm