Digital learning problems - F is for Feedback

Good morning, colleagues! A year ago I posted a popular column titled "The A-Z problems of digital learning." One thing that I thought would be effective this year is to break down solutions for each of these issues. This week, I'm going to talk about "F": Feedback.

With everything else going on, it can be tough to provide timely feedback. But you need to ask yourself this question, what is a better use of your time... discussing feedback with your students in class (either in person or digitally) or handing back an assignment with feedback that they'll never look at? There are some great ways to provide timely feedback that require a little bit of upfront work from you, but it saves you so much time later!

Google Forms + Autocrat: My absolute favorite way to provide feedback for students is through Google Forms and the Google Sheets extension Autocrat. I use this with my students every week as they watch the broadcast. I design a feedback form in Google Forms (the skeleton is there, but not all of the details) which I then make a copy for each week (and update it as necessary with further information for the week). As students watch the broadcast, they fill out the feedback form. I also designed a handout that will get sent back to the students. The handout is designed to collect the information that I want students to see. I run Autocrat after students have finished, and their answers populate where the <<question>> marks are located. Once the document is created, I link the report to the students' hyperdoc for the week. You can also share the document directly from Autocrat. It's SLICK once you figure out the intricacies.

Google Forms, Schoology Quizzes, Socrative: These three programs are perfect for multiple choice quizzes, short answer responses, polls, and discussions. You can add in your m.c. and t/f answers so that these programs auto-grade for you. You can also add feedback if students get a response wrong. The Schoology discussions are helpful because you can reply back to the students, or have the students respond to each other. You can also hide the answers from the students so they can see which questions they got wrong, but need to spend time finding the right solution. Let the technology take the bulk of the work from you!

Screencastify: Screencastify is a free screencasting tool that I've raved about for quite some time. I use it to create video directions for students or how-to videos. But I've also used it to provide feedback for students. It can be a challenge to have a 1:1 conversation with students, so I found it sufficient to have my 1:1 conversation digitally. Students could watch my video as many times as they needed to make the changes necessary on a rough draft, project, or presentation.

ShowMe: I never used ShowMe with my Social Studies classes, but it seems like something great to use with your students. It allows you to write over your students’ work while recording your voice. I also read that even if they gave you a hard copy of their work, you can still take a photo of it and then add your comments. It's another way for students to have the opportunity to watch the video as many times as they needed to make changes. You could also do this with Explain Everything if you have iPads.

Google Docs: When students had a day where they spent the entire class writing, I found it useful to Airplay one student's work and "make suggestions" on their work. For the student whose assignment I was editing, they got feedback from me. The other students saw what I was correcting (writing out numbers under 100, adding citations, remove contractions, etc.) and made those changes to their own assignments. And I only had to open one document, not thirty! Catlin Tucker takes this a step further on her blog. She talks a lot about station rotations with helpful tips and tricks to use technology to provide great instant feedback for students!

Wordle (or any word cloud app): I never actually did this with my students, but saw this idea out there elsewhere. As you read through an assignment, type in the Wordle box all of the "issues" of "fixes" you want the students to see. By the end, you'll have a feedback word cloud for the student for their assignment. You don't even have to markup the activity - have the student check their document with the word cloud in their hand.

As always, I hope I provided you with some helpful ideas regarding feedback. The most instant the information, the more useful it is for students. Isn't that what we're always trying to do? Make our students better?

Thanks for reading! I'll see you next week :)

- Rachel

@historicalipad
My Teacherspayteachers website