Process Feedback - Writing Process Reports for Google Docs
Extension Actions
- Extension status: Featured
Free writing process reports for Google Docs · Students prove their own work · Teachers see edits, AI use, and copy-paste events
🏆 Used by 100,000+ teachers and students · 400+ verified reviews · Free for individuals
Process Feedback turns the edit history of any Google Docs document into a detailed Writing Process Report. It shows the data users need to explore possible AI use, along with typing time, copy-paste events, revision patterns, and more.
It is a free, research backed alternative to tools like Draftback, Revision History, and Grammarly Authorship, with rich process insights, privacy focused sharing, and support for teachers and students.
For students: understand your own writing process and share it to show your learning journey.
For teachers: see how students wrote, not just what they submitted.
📌 What is the Process Feedback extension?
The extension reads the edit history Google already maintains for every document and turns the full writing journey into an interactive writing process report. It does not run in the background and collects no data unless the user chooses to share.
✨ Key Features
➛ Identify AI use timing and locations in your document's edit history
➛ Copy and paste events, including what was pasted and when
➛ Total typing time and typing fluency
➛ Revision vs. drafting time
➛ Break frequency and timing
➛ Author contributions in collaborative documents
➛ Teacher dashboard for managing and comparing multiple student reports
➛ Google Classroom integration
➛ Shareable report link and PDF download
➛ Multiple tabs support
👤 Who is it for?
Students use it to reflect on their writing process and to prove their own work when academic integrity is questioned.
Teachers use it to understand how students approach writing, identify who needs support before deadlines, and start honest conversations about AI use without relying on unreliable AI detectors.
✨ How is it different?
Unlike AI detectors that guess whether text was AI generated, Process Feedback shows writing history that helps users explore possible AI use, review pasted content, and see how the document evolved from the first keystroke to submission.
It is a free alternative to Draftback, Revision History, Grammarly Authorship, and Originality.ai, with rich process insights, better privacy, and no subscription required.
Built on peer-reviewed research published in Education Sciences (2023). Used in 100+ countries.
⚙️ How does it work?
The extension reads the edit history Google already maintains for every document. Click "Writing Process Report" in the ribbon and it processes everything locally on your device and generates an interactive report instantly.
🛠️ How do I use it?
➛ Step 1: Add this extension to your browser
➛ Step 2: Open your Google document
➛ Step 3: Click "Writing Process Report" in the newly added ribbon below the toolbar
➛ Step 4: If needed, you can change the settings to see a simpler button instead
🔗 How to share the writing process report?
➛ Share Link: Copy the report URL and share it with your teacher or student
➛ Share PDF: Click "Download Process Report" in the sidebar
📚 For teachers: integration guide
Visit www.processfeedback.org/gdocs for step-by-step instructions, including how to use the teacher dashboard for large classes.
❌ Having trouble installing?
➛ You need to be logged in to Chrome to install any extension
➛ Reload the Google Docs page after installing
➛ Your institution's IT department may need to approve new extensions
🔒 Privacy
➛ Privacy by default: your data never leaves your device unless you choose to share. When you do share, it collects only what's needed for that report.
➛ Data is only collected when a user chooses to save online to share a report, and only to enable that sharing
➛ For co-edited documents, obtain permission from all co-authors before viewing or sharing process reports
➛ Full privacy policy: processfeedback.org/privacy
📜 Terms and conditions
By installing the extension you agree to the terms at processfeedback.org/terms
📖 Research citation
Adhikari, Badri; "Thinking Beyond Chatbots' Threat to Education: Visualizations to Elucidate the Writing or Coding Process"; Education Sciences; 2023.
Latest reviews
- Dana Chincarini
- As a high school English teacher, this extension is SO HELPFUL. I can see the writing process and easily determine whether or not students are using AI. I can also see a more in-depth editing history than what Google Docs offers.
- Andy Ballard
- Only just found it. Used it today and it exonerated a student whom I thought had cheated by copy and pasting from elsewhere by replaying his writing process. Amazing. All teachers should use this free tool
- Adam Boorstein
- Fantastic extension for teachers. It helps identify students cheating. The identification of pasting events and if the copied text was from inside or outside the document is very helpful, a long with the time spent editing the document it is very easy to identify students that used AI to write. If it would build in an automatic AI detector it would be amazing.
- Brendan
- Powerful extension that provides insight into your writing
- Amanda Stockley
- So helpful in the age of AI and student apathy.
- Maria Pocek
- Process Feedback provides invaluable information, especially for teachers. I find the copy/paste analysis incredibly useful (more detailed than other apps I've tried). These reports also serve as great springboards for conversations with students and their parents/guardians. I'd highly recommend it!
- Gia Bao Ngo
- nice
- Kevin Thompson
- This is amazing!
- Adam H
- Very useful as a tool for teachers and teaches students to not just blindly copy-paste!
- Theo Löfgren
- Very good tool, was able to see which of my group-members cheated in the document when they copy-pasted straight from GPT.
- Brooke Anhder
- In ELA, we encourage students to use the writing process to BUILD an essay. Process Feedback has helped me as a teacher, be able to see this process in action. I can watch a sped up display of the student typing at any point in the document's history. This is much more helpful than checking a timestamp on a student's document. Process Feedback has helped me see when students use copy and paste, versus revising, which has been a helpful in detecting AI use as well. I'm VERY grateful it's availble for free to educators. Our school's tech department allowed us to install it on our chrome browser.
- Jennifer Lee
- The BEST app I've used for seeing a student's writing process and to check for plagiarism. The large text (over 25 words) copy/paste is amazing and I really like seeing the video of their writing process, where you can watch them drop whole blocks of text into a document. My admin backs me up when I give a zero with proof from Process Feedback attached. This should be used by ALL teachers. It is a lifesaver!
- Molly DeLosa
- I love this. I have caught so many kids plagiarizing with the large text copy/paste. It can often be a difficult thing to prove that a kid plagiarized an essay, but this is a great tool to use to have that conversation with a student, and in my experience, when they see that it says their writing came from an outside source, they will most likely own up to it. Please don't make teachers pay for it!
- James Neve
- This is an outstanding tool; I pray it can remain free- this is EXACTLY the way technology should work for us to make education more transparent and accountable. To make big bucks off of a serious need such as this addresses would be a typical example of the utter failings of capitalism, in my honest opinion. Google hopefully paid the developer a one-time SUBSTANTIAL sum to share this product. I just discovered this tool in May of '26, and I use it in my AP Research class. Without it, accountability would be more difficult. I've been paying for Draftback all year, on my own dime, which is a champagne problem, I admit. ANYWAY, sorry for the rant. I love this VERY HELPFUL TOOL. Please let it be free.
- Brandi Johnson
- As a high school teacher, I love this tool! I am able to front load all of this information to my students, so they know I am awards of the powers of AI.
- Pamela Schwager
- This tool is extremely useful as an educator. The instances of plagiarism in my 7th grade classes have grown exponentially in the past few years. This tool helps to verify suspicions, have conversations with parents and students, and keep kids honest.
- James Allen
- The best tool of its kind, including those that have implemented paywalls and subscriptions. The sheer volume of data can seem overwhelming at first, but there are lots of ways to tailor the interface to your needs. As an AP English Language and Composition teacher, I use PF to expand my conversations with my students. We can reflect not only on the strength of their final product but on their time management, drafting methods, revision strategies, and overall level of investment in their work. Since I'm asking more of their writing than any teacher before, the class can be a gauntlet, and the extra information is a fantastic support to all parties involved.
- MC JS
- amazing tool to help see if it was written by AI
- Jason Hearn
- Got some great analytical data to help authenticate student work. I dont use this as a teaching tool but more as an academic honesty tool which leads to proactive discussions on students work.
- Deborah Gdula
- Amazing way for students to chronicle their writing journey and an incredible tool for them to use as data to combat the chance of being "accused" of AI use in their writing.
- Alexander Paul Burton
- As an author this tool is amazing. I include an overview of changes in the back of my books thanks to this tool! Highly recommended!
- Rusel Smith
- The information provided by this extension is fantastic. It allows me to look at several different aspects of the editing process, which helps maintain student accountability. In turn, this saves my sanity from having to decide which essays need to be reviewed for suspicious behavior.
- Tom Burkart
- As a high school English teacher with nearly 200 students, this is my favorite extension to streamline grading and hold kids accountable. I've found the banner feature extremely helpful, revealing suspicious submissions without having to open any additional tabs. The reports provide the most thorough presentation of each Doc's metadata that I've found. Great product!
- William McDarmont
- An invaluable tool for instructors of writing. Not only can it provide some of the most visible evidence of plagiarism AI use but it can also actually help students track and monitor their own writing process.
- Stephen Woertz
- This is an excellent extension. Easy to use and clearly shows how and when a doc was edited. I had no idea how pervasive the cheating was in my class until I started using this. I highly recommend using this extension.
- Joshua Sheridan
- I love how easy Process Feedback is for Google Docs to use. At a glance it shows you the edits of the google doc, how many authors, and how long the document was edited for. You can also click an explore process button which gives you more details, but I find the thumbnail data is usually enough for me to reliably ascertain time spent editing and working on the document. It's a great tool that I use every day as a teacher. I highly recommend this tool as it makes life easier!
- Lynn Barnsback
- I found the date here to be detailed and very helpful when seeing how much my students actually worked on the project. The Charts gave a terrific visual, the breakdown of who entered what helped identify slackers in a group project. Wonderful data that I will use in my college courses.
- Niaa Bhusal
- this is actually a good extension
- PAUL MILLER
- The feedback here is useful not only to check up on AI brain rot but also to facilitate discussions if the writing process. And it's user friendly!
- Michelle Brown
- I'm grateful to the author of this extension for the depth and breadth of these Process Feedback reports. Yes, they help me catch students using large language models like ChatGPT to write students' compositions for them, but more importantly even than that, they've helped me clear students that Turnitin.com falsely accuse. I say "more importantly" because I find the false accusation more horrifying than student dishonesty. Students have the excuse that they're still learning, still building their ethics. Turnitin.com does not have that excuse. I uncovered the false accusation when Turnitin.com flagged huge chunks of text uploaded at once, which makes sense, right? It does, except when the huge chunk of text is an APA formatted document written in Lorem Ipsum that the student then overwrites with their own words. I would not have known they'd done this if not for Process Feedback showing me every instance of students pasting text into the document. Thank you, Process Feedback, for uncovering what was behind that Turnitin.com flag.
- Xander SIOSE
- Very helpful
- Elaine N Lindstrom
- This is hands-down the best tool so far invented for verifying whether students are doing their own work or not. Just this afternoon I have a student who turned in an essay different from the topic he was working on earlier. I looked at the process to see what I could discover about why he changed topics. Low and behold, he wrote this essay a year and a half ago, obviously last school year and not for this class at all. I would be very interested in having a similar tool that can be used to see the process students use when creating a Google Slideshow. As far as I can tell, this extension does not work for Slideshows? I guess I should check to see if there is a similar extension for Slideshows.
- Amanda Frederico
- The level of detail in the reports makes it easy to have conversations with students about their work, as well as to see how groups collaborate (or not). As an English teacher, this is a wonderful tool to help support my efforts to ensure my students are the authors of their own work, and not copying and pasting from other sources.
- Marshall Bierson
- Best tool I know for reviewing the editing process of student papers to help identify and confirm human authorship. I'd probably happily pay and am so glad its free.
- Tia Miller
- SO MUCH useful information. I am especially a fan of the calendar that lets me know when and for how long my students worked. When I give them time in class to work then see nothing on the calendar, it is a clear sign they are not using their time wisely. I also recently had to assess students' level of revision. The calendar links directly to a side by side comparison of their paper, showing each revision made during a time period. It made scoring that element much easier. Tons of useful information combined with the fact that it is free makes this an English teacher's best friend.
- Alexandra Sheridan
- So helpful and easy to use!!
- Sue Grove
- Helpful in knowing how much support my students require, especially in light of what they copy and paste from other sources.
- Bess
- It is fantastic, and returns "editing and revision" to the writing process. it becomes very obvious when they're transcribing from AI versus writing their own essays with drafts and sweat and tears.
- Sally Lawton
- This extension is amazing. It has taken so much of the stress out of looking at revision history. It is much easier for me to see if a student was transcribing or if they copied and pasted.
- Lauren Godbey
- It really streamlined the process of checking work history. Both the "at a glance" details and even just the short summary have made the plagiarism checking process much more efficient. I just hope that the data privacy is maintained in a transparent way so this can be fully used by schools.
- Katelyn Moss
- Excellent tool for checking student plagiarism!
- Maria Gonzalez
- I am loving this new feature- no more seeking out apps to check for plagiarism or AI! Being able to see the video of how a student created or completed a doc is a GAME CHANGER- I don't have to have the accusatory conversations anymore- I just call students to my desk and show the process video of them pasting the info, making 3 edits, and clocking 49 secs to write a 2 page paper- nope- LOVE it
- Courtney Sullivan
- Great for teachers.
- Tony Wilson
- This is a terrific extension, and a helpful tool for students and teachers to track the development of student writing over the course of the semester.
- Logan Kammerer
- Free and intuitive.
- Tom Gaffigan
- Best of these tools we've tried--not even close!
- Cara Drexler
- So helpful in reviewing a student's writing process!
- MEGHAN DEJONG
- As a high school English teacher in the age of AI, this is a god send. Huge fan and recommend it to all other teachers
- Ms. Carp she-her-hers
- By far the best of these kinds of tools that I've worked with, and FREE on top of that. Thank you for providing. It's essential in this age of AI tools. It's helping me keep my students honest about their work.
- Patience A. SOULE
- Very useful for many purposes. Sharing the report with students so helpful when they're reflecting on their work. They can see their own patterns of workflow, any problem areas like pasting a paragraph and then trying to edit it into their own words, how long they actually spent on each section, etc. It's also very helpful as a teacher. Excellent resource!