Delivering Feedback Faster
As you may know, back in August I returned to the classroom on a full-time basis. Not as a teacher, but as a student. That experience has reinforced my belief that prompt feedback is one of the most important things you can give to students. On that note, this week I have some tech tips that can help you quickly provide feedback to your students.
Faster Essay Feedback
When I taught social studies, grading my students’ essay assignments was always the second most time-consuming task I had to do. The most time-consuming task was providing feedback on rough drafts. I wish that the tools available now were available back when I was spending a whole weekend reading one hundred high school students’ essays about the Bill of Rights.
gotLearning’s gotFeedback tool uses AI to help you quickly analyze and provide feedback on your students’ essay assignments. Depending upon which version of gotFeedback you use, you can use it on PDFs, Word documents, and Google Documents. Demonstrations of gotFeedback can be watched here and here.
If you don’t want to incorporate yet another tool into your feedback workflow, consider making better use of the tools already available to you. If you work in a school that uses Google Workspace, Google Classroom and Google Keep have features that can help you deliver feedback faster. In Google Classroom you can create a comment bank to use when grading. In Google Docs you can use Google Keep as a comment bank for providing feedback. Here’s a tutorial on using Google Keep as a comment bank. Here’s a video about the Google Classroom comment bank.
Those of you who use Word as your primary document tool, may want to give e-Comments a try. With e-Comments you can add canned video, audio, and text comments to your students’ essays. Take a look at this demo to see how e-Comments works.
Multiple Choice Feedback
Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, and just about every “quiz game” platform like Kahoot make it easy to quickly provide students with a raw score of how many questions they answered correctly. And most of those platforms also let you show students which answers were the correct and incorrect choices. That feedback on its own can be valuable. What’s even more valuable is feedback that includes an explanation of why an answer choice was or wasn’t correct.
In Google Forms and Microsoft Forms you can provide students with video explanations of the correct and incorrect answer choices. Watch this video to learn how to include video feedback in Microsoft Forms. Watch this video to see how you can deliver feedback in Google Forms.