One of the downsides of having students compose their writing digitally is that the copy/paste functions makes it all too tempting for them to plagiarize the works of others. Viewing the revision history in Google Docs (go to File>See Revision History) can help give you some insight into the writing process of your students. If a document has no revision history, then it is most likely that the text was directly pasted into the document from another source. To see an even more detailed view of the creation of the document, you can download a Chrome Extension called Draftback: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/draftback?hl=en-US

Once installed, when a student shares a document with you, you will see a Draftback button on the upper left of the document which will give you a play-by-play video of the creation process of the document. This is a useful tool as you can see how much time the student spent on the writing, who it was shared with, and how many revisions were made. It is essentially like you looked over your student’s shoulder while he/she was typing- except in fast motion.

For more on how this works you can watch a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAgcNeBEfgAOr a longer video with curriculum ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUzHWOgdjwg&t=318s