Fantastic Feedback Tools and Where to Find Them

Purpose & objective

As students create more work that is digital, educators need new ways to provide feedback. In the past when a student turned in the paper copy of their essay, story, report, or project, it was common for their teacher to pull out a red pen to provide handwritten feedback on the pages of the student's work. Feedback is a critical part of the learning process, providing helpful information on strengths, weaknesses, and guidance for improvement.

Now with tools such as Google Docs and Classroom, it is easy for students to create and submit their work digitally. So how does a teacher leave feedback on an electronic document? As we move from paper and pencil to Docs and digital, we need options for providing feedback that is valuable to the student, but not cumbersome and unnatural for the teacher to create.

Thankfully there are many excellent options for creating feedback for digital work. The purpose of this session is to explore four specific options:

1) Text feedback - Using the built-in Comment feature in the Google tools, as well as Google Keep integration for collaborative comment banks shared between educators, or the comment bank feature in Classroom.

2) Voice feedback - Using the free Read&Write for Google Chrome web extension or Mote web extension. These extensions provide you with the ability to record spoken feedback and add that to the document.

3) Video feedback - Using the ChromeOS Screencast tool or the free Screencastify Chrome web extension to record a video of your scrolling through the student document, highlighting different sections, and narrating your comments about their work.

4) Handwritten feedback - Using the Google Classroom mobile app it is possible to add handwritten annotations to your students’ Google Docs. This makes it possible for teachers to circle words, draw in proofreading marks, use different colors, and hand write comments right onto the Doc.

In addition to teachers providing digital feedback for students, these same tools can be used by students to communicate and collaborate with their peers for peer review and feedback, as well as engage in digital dialog with their teachers concerning their work.

Outline

The session will cover the following information. Note: live links to the resources referenced below can be accessed at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dkr61Sg1cA48Ag3uepd9VmqPkFGT_D5XLbYIZwNXI-o/edit

1) Educational benefits and overview of digital feedback for student work. (5 minutes)

2) Text feedback (15 minutes)
Using the built-in Comment feature in Google Docs, as well as Google Keep integration for shared comment banks, and the comment bank feature in Classroom.

3) Voice feedback (15 minutes)
Installing and using the free Mote web extension. Using the extension to record and insert spoken feedback for the document.

4) Video feedback (15 minutes)
Using a screen recording tool (Google Screencast, Screencastify, etc.) to record video feedback, save the video to Google Drive, and share and insert the video link in the student document.

5) Handwritten feedback (10 minutes)
Installing and using the Google Classroom mobile app to add handwritten annotated feedback to student work.

Throughout the session, participants will be encouraged to test out each of these tools and options using the techniques demonstrated.

Supporting research

Much research and writing has been done on the educational benefits of feedback for student work, especially in regards to the benefits of using a variety of media for the feedback. The University of North Florida Center for Instruction and Research Technology has an excellent article summarizing these findings at:
https://www.unf.edu/cirt/services/id/bestpractices/benefits-of-providing-feedback-to-students.aspx

Key points in the research include how students found multimedia feedback to be “easy/clear to understand in comparison to normal methods of feedback” and “more extensive, informative, the key points were better emphasized and that it aided their visualization of the task through demonstrations and/or diagrams” and “was more personal that written feedback”.

In addition, "Feedback" is listed as one of the top positive influences on student achievement in James Hattie's "Visible Learning" study at:
https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/