“Ms. Mullikin needs to incorporate more feedback into her lesson plans.”

“Ms.Mullikin, can you give me more feedback on my project I just did?”

“Ms. Mullikin, we would like you to reflect and give some feedback about your lessons!”

This was the type of feedback I used to receive in my first few years of teaching.

But as a teacher, I was dropping the ball on this important part of the learning process.

Most teachers hate grading. I especially hate grading. I never liked the idea of spending hours flipping through pages of work of my students, and writing feedback to my students, when most of them tossed their papers into the trash after passing them back. Early on in my teaching career I became so frustrated, that I just stopped giving feedback all together. I would put grades into the online portal, never hand back papers, and would wait patiently for students to come see me if they had questions about why they got a certain grade. (Not many showed up.) Let me tell you, this process worked great! I didn’t spend hours putting comments on things, I didn’t spend time passing back papers to students, and the few times students did ask about their grades, I was able to show them.

I did this exact process for a few years. It worked. I never took work home. I never had students question my grading. I had lots of free time to plan lessons and fun learning activities (or fun-tivities as I refer to them in my class) instead of analyzing and explaining to my students what they knew and didn’t know. But at the end of the day, I was scoring low on the feedback portions of my evaluations, and I could tell that students who missed information didn’t improve. The students who mastered the concept, weren’t able to see their good work, or investigate even further in their learning. I was totally dropping the proverbial ball on this part of teaching. I was coming up with great lesson plans, and activities to do in my class. But, I never followed through with constructive feedback for my kiddos. Something had to change.

While there are a variety of ways I provide feedback to my students (and they provide feedback to me), I want to highlight four of my absolute favorites. All four of these tools allow for quick, timely feedback that can determine where my teaching needs to go. A few offer the chance for peer feedback and evaluation, and all of them allow me to visualize my students learning. According to Hattie and Gan, the learning environment should be open to errors and disconfirmation. It is also important to have peer feedback that provides a platform for engaging students in interactive and elaborative feedback, as well as taking ownership of their learning. Feedback should also cue teachers’ attention to errors in their own instruction so that modifications can be made to improve teaching a learning (Hattie & Gan, 2010, Pg. 250). With these considerations in mind, I want to show you a few EdTech tools that can help provide interactive, engaging feedback that can help students take ownership of their learning and can provide visual evidence of learning (or lack of learning) to help drive instruction for teachers.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM

The first EdTech tool that helps with feedback is Google Classroom. If you are unfamiliar with Classroom, it is a LMS, or Learning Management System designed for teachers to communicate, interact, collect and hand out activities and manage all the digital aspects of a classroom. While you can use Google Classroom for lots of tasks, my favorite part of Google Classroom is the comment features! It allows you to comment on students work, make suggestions, and it allows for peer feedback as well. Before introducing all of these tools for peer feedback it is important to train your students on the proper ways to give feedback. “The most effective use of peer assessment often occurs following deliberate training of students in providing peer feedback, ensuring that peer feedback is integrated into the lesson in a deliberative and transparent manner, and when rubrics are provided to the students that outline the criteria of the lesson (Hattie & Gan, 2010, Pg. 264.)” I like to use the comment feature on Google Classroom. This feature allows not only myself, but other students to provide constructive feedback to their peers. “Teachers who do not acknowledge the importance of peer feedback can be most handicapped in their effects on students (Hattie & Gan, 2010, Pg. 263).”

"Feedback is provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self/experience) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding that reduces the discrepancy or what is understood and what is aimed to be understood (Hattie & Gan, 2010, pg. 257-8)."

"Feedback enables students to take and active role in the management of their own learning, helps to enhance students' self assessment skills, and can improve learning of subject matter (Boud et al., 1999)"

PADLET

With the emergence of technology usage in the classroom, we are now able to make learning visible across many platforms. “In the past it was difficult to help our students visualize their thinking because we didn’t have time to hear from each an every student and listen to their reflections very often… we can ask students to reveal their insights by offering the use of apps that allow them to articulate and record their learning experiences, ideas and thinking (Clark, 2017).” One way that I love to make learning visible is by using Padlet. Padlet is an interactive blog-type wall where students can post, comment, like and share all sorts of information. Teachers can use Padlet as a ticket-out-the-door, collection of ideas, a collaboration tool for the whole class, or a way to quickly visualize whether students have obtained the material. It’s also a great way to build relationships with your students, because it is fun, and interactive. And you can be a little silly too. Here is a link to a Padlet that I used in Child Development. We were talking about P.I.E.S. Development (Physical, Intellectual, Emotional and Social) and I wanted to students to visualize the various areas and explain how the picture represented a specific area of development. As you can see, some students were serious, some were silly, but at the end of the day, I was able to quickly see if students understood the main concept of P.I.E.S. and I was able to provide feedback and interaction, quickly and transparently.

FLIPGRID

FlipGrid is a video-response platform that features grids and topics that ask different questions or prompts. FlipGrid is great because the grid environment empowers students to respond to their classmates’ videos as well as self-reflect (Clark, 2017). I love FlipGrid because it lets students use their creativity to self-reflect on a topic. For example; I had my students read an article about color coding food based on the Stoplight System. Click here for the article! Students were then asked to respond to the following questions: Do you believe color-coding food products in our school cafeteria would encourage students to make better food choices? Why or why not? Would it personally help you make better choices? Explain.

As you can see some students did better than others, but it’s another great way to visualize learning, and interact with classmates in a new way. I like FlipGrid because students can embed their videos into their digital portfolios. It’s another medium to provide feedback, and get students excited and motivated about learning.

“The premise of the visibility model is that feedback is most powerful when it makes learning visible to the teacher (who can also be the learner). The notion is that the teacher needs to construct environments and activities that optimize making the learning of the student visible to the teacher (and preferably also to the student) (Hattie & Gan, 2010, Pg. 257).”

GOOGLE FORMS

Lastly, I want to touch on Google Forms. Another wonderful tool in the Google Apps for Education Suite. Google Forms is a great way to quickly gather survey data, and collect feedback from students. I use Google Forms for course evaluations, quick checks for understanding, quizzes, and bell work. I Love that the responses are quickly sorted and put into graphics that I can use to change my instruction. They are so easy to set up, and students can easily provide their answers. I love using it gather feedback about lessons, too. It is important for teachers to reflect on their practice, as well. And involving students in this process (while a little bit scary) is so beneficial as a teacher. A nice part of Google Forms is having all your responses be droped into a Google Sheets document. Allowing for quick sorting, too!

These four tools are just some of the great EdTech apps that help teachers and student to provide meaningful feedback. I am constantly trying out new ways to help provide my students with the information they need, and the critiques and explanations for what they can do next time. I truly believe that making learning visible, authentic, and relevant to my students will help them be the best they can be. (And their feedback will help me become a better teacher, too!)

SOURCES

Boud, D. Cohen, R., & Samson, J. (1999). Peer learning and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 24(4), 413.

Clark, H. (2017). Google infused classroom. S.1.: EdTech Team Press.

Hattie, J., & Gan, M. (2010). Instruction based on feedback. In R. E. Mayer & P. A. Alexander (Eds.). Handbook of research on learning and instruction (pp. 249-271). New York: Routledge.

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