Process Feedback - Writing Process Reports for Google Docs
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Free writing process reports for Google Docs · Students prove their own work · Teachers see edits, AI use, and copy-paste events
📌 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
- Jenna Hohmann
- Process feedback is so helpful. I'm thankful it's in my teacher toolkit now.
- Sara Disu
- I've only used this to view a student's work twice, but each time it's been invaluable. Viewing the pacing stats has been enough to prove plagiarism on both occasions.
- Nitin Bhojraj
- As a teacher, Process Feedback has been incredibly valuable. My original goal was to prevent students from using AI in their papers, but it has also given me the ability to work with students on early draft/outlines of their papers to give them instruction early one, and insight into how students work - based on time statistics and video replay. I can't recommend this enough.
- James Thibaudeau
- Beautiful
- Bryan Clintberg
- Fantastic and very helpful to ensure students are honest regarding their ownership of their original work. Sadly, I have needed to show parents when students have obviously copy and pasted in entire blocks of work generated by AI (showing the machine code from it). This extension allows me to show this.
- Stuart MACKINTOSH
- Has been so useful for me to track students, and they take greater ownership of their own work now they know they are being monitored. As mentioned by others, it also helps exonerate students under suspicion. Have shared with many colleagues.
- Mrs. Walter
- I have been meaning to write this review for a while now. This is a fantastic tool for so many reasons. I love all of the data it provides even though I don't know what some of it means yet. I feel tools like this are key to understanding writing patterns.
- Lauren Paquette
- Excellent Source! Better than other tools I have paid for to use.
- Barry Redmond Carvajal
- This has become part of the teacher's toolkit in my school. Great piece of software.
- Ismat Dewji Sheriff
- Excellent! Very helpful to identify the student's thinking process.
- Heidi Rizley
- I can't believe how many features this extention has! So much data. So helpful.
- Carrye De Mers
- Very impressed with how this extension works. I appreciate being able to share reports. The data points produced by the report provide excellent talking points when trying to distinguish if student work is authentic.
- 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.