What is Track Changes?

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Track Changes is a way to keep track of the changes made to a document. This isgreat for showing what your work started like compared to the ﬁnal version. It is also goodfor doing partner proofreading for errors in spelling, punctuation or grammar.

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You can choose to display those changes, or to hide them. Hiding them doesn't makethem go away. The only way to remove the tracked changes is to accept or reject them.

How to Start Tracking the Changes to a Document

Click on the

Track Changes

button on the toolbarOR click on Edit >Track Text Changes

The Change Tracking Control Bar

When you turn on the tracking, this toolbar opens and a comments pane area opens up tothe left of the document.

Tracking Changes in Action

•One student writes a story in Pages and saves it without tracking changes.•Their editing partner then opens up the story, turns on Track Changes and ﬁnds a fewspelling errors that they think need to be corrected. They then correct these errors andsave the story.•The writer of the story opens up the document once more, turns on Track Changes andreviews the changes to the spelling. They decide which they agree with and will thereforeaccept and which they don

t agree with (the editing partner may have made an error aswell).Change Tracking ToolbarComments PaneClick on the tick or cross inthe change bubble toaccept or reject a change.

What are comments?

Comments allow you to add a comment or suggestion rather than actually making achange to the writing. The writer can add comments to their own writing to draw theirpartner

s attention to what they think are the best parts and also places where they arestuck and would like more ideas. Their partner could use comments to also say what theyliked about the writing and suggest some changes that could improve it.

How to add comments to a document

Have the cursor where you want to comment to goor highlight a group of words that you want tocomment on (like in my example below) and thenclick on the Comment button in the toolbar OR choose Insert > Comment.Again the Comments Pane will open to the left of the writing with a coloured box for you totype your comment into. Save the document when you have ﬁnished adding all of yourcomments.

How to view comments that are saved into a document

Click on

View

in the top left corner and select

Show Comments

OR use the View in themenu bar and choose

Show Comments

Comments in Action

•One student writes a story in Pages and adds a few comments to show what they areproud of and what areas they would like more ideas for.•Their editing partner then opens up the story, reads it, and only then views the commentsof the writer. They read the story one more time thinking carefully about the story interms of what is good about it, what could be improved and how they can help the writerwith the things they had asked for support with.•The editing partner now adds comments to say which part of the story they had enjoyedand WHY as well as suggestions for improvements (not doing the actual writing butadding comments that help guide the writer).•The writer now opens up their own work and reviews the comments of their partner aswell as their own original comments and starts to rewrite sections of their writing in orderto improve it and corrects any proofreading errors.•This cycle is repeated as many times as desired until the writing has reached a certainstandard.Click on the cross to close thecomment after considering andactioning the suggestions