Process Feedback for Google Docs
Extension Actions
- Live on Store
Shows the edit history of a Google Docs document
📌 What is the Process Feedback extension?
The Process Feedback extension is for teachers and students. It pulls the edit history of a Google Docs document and turns that history into a writing process report.
In the process report, you can explore copy-paste events, the frequency and timing of breaks taken, typing fluency, time spent on each paragraph, time allocated to revision compared to initial drafting, and total typing time.
✨ Key Features:
➛ Support for multiple tabs
➛ Shows user contributions
➛ Works for Google Classrooms
👤 Who is it for?
The extension is primarily designed for students to self-reflect on their writing process.
⚙️ How does it work?
The extension pulls the entire edit history of your Google Doc, which is already maintained by Google, and turns the writing journey into an interactive process report.
🛠 How do I use the extension?
➛ Step 1: Add this extension to your browser
➛ Step 2: Open your Google document
➛ Step 3: Find the "Explore Process" button near the menu bar and click on it
➛ Step 4: If you prefer the ribbon view instead, change the settings in the extension popup
🔗 How to share the writing process report?
➛ Share Link: Copy the URL of the report link and share it.
➛ Share PDF: In the sidebar, click "Download Process Report" to download a PDF of the process report.
📚 How can teachers integrate it into a course?
Please visit www.processfeedback.org/gdocs for step-by-step instructions on how to integrate the extension into your course.
✨ How is it different from other extensions?
Unlike extensions like Draftback, this extension provides many rich features. Students can also download a PDF report or simply share a link to their process report. In a way, it is a free alternative to extensions like Draftback, Originality.ai, Revision History, and Grammarly Authorship, but with many more features.
❌ Unable to install the extension?
➛ To install any Chrome extension, you need to log in to Chrome.
➛ Please reload the Google Docs page after installing the extension.
➛ Your institution's IT department may need to approve installing any new Chrome extension.
⚠️ Limitations
The extension is not well-tested with large documents with 100K+ changes or 100K+ characters. Its text styling is also not perfect yet. If you run into issues using the extension, please email us at [email protected].
🔒 Privacy policy
➛ By default, this extension does not collect any user data and runs fully locally in a user's device.
➛ When a user chooses to save online, for sharing the report with others, it collects the author information and full edit history data of the Google Docs document. Collected data is stored only so users can view reports with the process report link and share the report with others.
➛ For co-edited documents, users should always obtain permission from all co-authors before viewing or sharing process reports.
📜 Terms and conditions
By installing the extension, you agree to and acknowledge the terms and conditions at https://processfeedback.org/terms/.
📖 Reference/citation
If you are using Process Feedback for a research project, please cite the following peer-reviewed research article:
Adhikari, Badri; "Thinking Beyond Chatbots' Threat to Education: Visualizations to Elucidate the Writing or Coding Process"; Education Sciences; 2023.
Latest reviews
- Thomas Johnson
- I never fill these rating things, but I am incredibly grateful for this extension, which a fellow teacher told me about - as it serves as a tremendous tool to better ensure kids are not using AI or other inappropriate short cuts.
- Nina Earlywine
- This is a great program for looking at revision history and being able to track what information is being added and when. This helps to hold students accountable for the work they are submitting and upholds the integrity of those students when they are flagged for AI usage.
- Anne LaGrand
- I just started using this and so far, it's great. Gives a timeline of edits (like draftback) but also shows material that was cut and paste, number of characters - additions and deletions - it's very thorough. It's very difficult to navigate the issue of AI in education, but I think this is a very helpful resource.
- Amanda Crawford
- Love this app! Thank you.
- Lisa Wills
- For anyone who used the Draftback extension (before they started charging for it), this is a free, amped up version of that extension. I especially love that I can see exactly what was copied and pasted into the document - and use this to have concrete conversations with students about the source of their writing.
- John Mazo
- Process Feedback is an outstanding tool for teachers. It gives me clear insight into how my students actually work on their writing—how long they spent, what they typed, when they revised, and where they copied and pasted from. Being able to see a draft replay and detailed copy‑paste history has made it much easier to support honest, authentic work and to have evidence-based conversations with students. The extension is easy to use, runs smoothly with Google Docs, and immediately became part of my daily workflow. It saves me time, reduces the stress of tracking potential plagiarism, and helps me give more targeted feedback on the writing process, not just the final product. Highly recommend this extension to any educator who assigns writing. It’s one of the most useful classroom tools I’ve added in years.
- Marcus Irvin
- Just got it but it has been working great. And it's free!
- Julie Deal
- The features on this are great for ensuring that students use their own thoughts. I love the draftback feature of real-time edits and the one that shows any copy and pastes, which differentiates between copies from within the text and without.
- Sam Eslamieh
- Amazing tool. Just what teachers need and much more
- Sean Adams
- This is an excellent tool for educators. I use this to help students improve their writing, as well as using it to look for students taking shortcuts. I wish I could give feedback, but it really is the best tool I have used. Once you understand each part of the program and all of the data analyzes, it becomes indispensable for the classroom. It's perfect for High School English. Thank you!
- Charles Moore
- Teachers need all the help we can get and this tool helps a lot!
- Simon Whedbee
- Excellent tool. You know why you want to use it. It does what you want. Nuff said. Go Bears 2026
- Christina Touchstone
- This helps relieve the stress of managing student plagiarism. Very thankful.
- Nancy Tompkins
- This is a superb tool. Every teacher needs it to review written assignments.
- Sabrina Lewis
- This is absolutely amazing. Students these days just rely on AI and copy-pasting to complete their assignments and this makes it so much easier to hold them accountable for that. Same with copying their friend. You can see how long it took them to complete their assignment, watch a replay of them completing it, see how many copy-paste events they had (and the content of each). This is a magical tool. Best extension ever.
- Ashlei Wrinkles
- Process Feedback is absolutely wonderful! As an educator, it makes it super easy to see student activity when working on ELA assignments. Highly recommend!
- Eric Wilmes
- An excellent tool for teachers to review student work.
- Mark Duhaime
- Magical.
- KAREN PEEBLES
- As a creative writing teacher, I absolutely recommend this app! I can see exactly how much students revise their work. I can also have them look at the feedback to see which words they are overusing. It helps so much to know there is something that helps me keep students honest as well.
- HEIDI WEBER
- Love this app! In minutes I can tell how long a student spent on writing a project, what steps they took to finish it, and I get a playback recording I can adjust and pause to help me determine if they used outside help or just made a mistake and accidentally "deleted." This tool gives me the evidence I need to make a stronger case to parents and admin that a student did or did not actually do their own work. Even better, it breaks down the mistakes that students fixed and gives a breakdown of words and phrases students need practice on. Very useful tool, thank you!!
- Felicia Yang
- This is an amazing tool for teachers to monitor AI/plagiarism. I love that you can change the granularity of detail in which the report shows the edits - super useful!
- Cory Snow
- Super helpful tool for teachers to detect AI usage/plagiarism. It's not perfect in that it doesn't show edits in real time (more like 3-5 second chunks), but it has a large-screen format for showing the original text and how the edits unfold. Solid!
- Stephen Thompson
- Very useful tool. I don't understand it all! But that doesn't matter. The banner that pops up in Google Classroom alone work for me.
- Leah Schwartz
- Process Feedback is incredibly helpful in helping hold students accountable to academic integrity. I don't know what I would do without it!
- Kelsey Ridinger
- Process Feedback is a game-changer for me as a high school English teacher. I can see the entire history, timing, and every key stroke of my students' essays. Invaluable in the fight for critical thinking and accountability.
- Melinda Webster
- This is so fabulous!!! I can't believe it's free! I tried using a ZeroGPT or something like that and it wanted to charge me after only 5 uses. This one in a lifesaver for determining AI. I'm going to a webinar to learn more about it tomorrow, but even just as a total beginner I love it. Try it!
- Elizabeth Sylvia
- Very useful feedback on student process
- Kevin Kendall
- This extension is a great help. I teach at a boarding school with international students who are well intentioned but sometimes fail to understand the research and writing process. This extension allows me to show them visually exactly what they did in terms of dropping in huge blocks of text from a source or from a translation app instead of a more natural research and writing process. It's a very powerful lesson that opens conversations. And it can also catch the native English speakers who have deliberately plagiarized and need to be referred to the honor council.
- Jason Wirtz
- Not only is this a wonderful safeguard against GenAI use, it allows students to view their own writing process unfold in real time allowing for reflection and analysis of their writing.
- Thomas Jurney
- Amazing - the true answer to AI. AI detectors are useless, but a program that monitors keystrokes is flawless - thank you!
- Cam Kaplan
- Incredible asset to teachers - this plugin is indispensable!
- Gary Mazurek
- Process Feedback has been a game changer for my classroom. At last, I can see which students contribute to group work, the time they spend on task, when text is pasted into the document, which is significant in the age of AI. Now, other apps and "Version History" performs these tasks. However, they do not performs these tasks all and once and with such speed. It’s made collaboration fairer, clearer, and way less guesswork-based, and I’ve honestly only scratched the surface of what it can do.
- Meredith Kelley
- Refreshing to have a an extension that does as much as this one does at no cost! Has been an immense help in identifiying plagiarism/un-cited AI usage in my students' writing.
- Erin Meade
- I found out about this app at an AI conference for teachers. I have been using it every day as an English teacher, and I can't believe how helpful it is in seeing students' thought process and writing edits. It is also very helpful when you have a suspicion that too much AI was used on an assignment. It gives an actual visual of the writing process, so I can show students where they messed up in using too much virtual help.
- liangzhu li
- It is a amazing extension I used, Greatly help me to prove my writing is written by myself.
- Michael Johnson
- This is the best app there is to track whether students work is authentic. It shows their whole process and breaks down how they worked on it, how much time spent, and large copy and pastes.
- Paul Weinstein
- The best tool for tracking students' writing - breaks down their entire process in incredible detail.
- Peter Morton
- One of the most useful document inspection tools out there. Incredibly helpful range of tools and easy to use. Amazing!
- Brent Warner
- Outstanding deep-dive tool that helps us talk to our students about how they write. I'm really grateful for all of the work the Process Feedback team has put into making this a practical resource. Highly recommended!
- Craig Stevens
- A fantastic tool that really helps teachers!
- Kierstin Helsel Thompson
- An outstanding tool for educators in the era of AI. The data provided is more thorough than I could have imagined, reporting not only on time spent in the document, but also which sections may have been pasted from outside sources. This extension helps take significant time out of the arduous effort to determine the authenticity of a student submission.
- Meryem Busra UNSAL
- We met with this app thanks to a colleague, and it saved us! we were looking for an effective tool to detect AI and see student progress, I think process feedback is great.
- Jen DeBaere
- This has been a huge help in detecting AI activity in student assignments. The data provided helps give a clear picture of the work students put into an assignment (or don't).
- William De Boer
- Holy this is really cool
- Jerrod Griebel
- This has been a game-changer for evaluating academic integrity among my students. I cannot recommend it enough!
- Michael Tobler
- Contributions/Editors, paste events, cpm metrics, graphs... this thing has it all. More than you probably need, even. I used Draftback before it went paid-for and am glad some tools are still free to use.
- JEFFREY KUSNIEZ
- This is a must have! It allows you to track edits on documents and see the resources students are using. It also helps with group projects to track who did or did not contribute to the project. And you have all the data at your fingertips to provide the evidence you need to support your case.
- Olives
- I'm so glad I found this app. I've been accused of using AI on my writing assignment when that's the farthest from the truth! But with this extension, I feel more assured that my originality can be defended. Thank you to all the people who helped to create this app.
- Morgan Clark
- Very detailed reports that allow me to see who contributed to a document with a click of a button. It also shows me what was copy/pasted into the document, when the document was worked on, and a writing replay. Saves a lot of time so I don't have to sift through the version history to find plagiarism.
- DIANE THOMPSON
- This is the best Chrome extension ever!! Anything you want to know about your students' writing, you can find it right here. It might add a minute to the grading process, but it saves a TON of time checking for plagiarism and authenticity elsewhere. I appreciate how in depth the reports are, and I gladly pay a small fee for this, so for it to be free, do whatever needs to be done to keep it!