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Tip #1 Play it back with a sticky note
Laura Holmgren is a High School English teacher and former K-12 Director of Educational Technology at Polytechnic school in Southern California. Laura uses Mote extensively, alongside video feedback and other tools, to give detailed and personalized feedback to her students on their writing assignments.
To ensure students have internalized and addressed her feedback before they start work on their next assignment, Laura asks students to summarize the oral feedback that she has given to them using Mote in bullet points on a sticky note, which they attach to the rubric she uses on assignments. This helps students to build the practice of reflection, and connects the feedback to the learning journey.
Tip #2: Make Feedback Reflection a Graded Assignment
Gavin Matthews is an English teacher at Taipei European School, Taiwan, where his students include many learning English as a second language. Gavin sees feedback as an essential component of his teaching, and he has assembled a comprehensive set of digital tools to help him to deliver high quality feedback on every assignment. He uses Mote in particular to give substantive, personalized feedback, especially as summative comments that accompany assignment grades.
Gavin’s approach to driving student engagement with his feedback is to create a Reflection Assignment in Google Classroom, where students summarize in their own words the feedback that they have received, and then describe how they plan to adjust their approach in their next assignment.
Gavin sees the benefit of this Reflection exercise in the improvements of his students’ work, as well as valuing the opportunity to hear from students whether they have internalized their work.
Click on this link to Make a Copy of the Feedback Template
Tip #3: Close the Loop with Mote Loops
If you’re already a Mote user, perhaps you’ve tried the ‘Loops’ feature, that is integrated within Google Classroom and Instructure Canvas. This allows students to indicate if they have understood the feedback that they have received, or if they may need help.
In either case, students are prompted to give a quick text comment as well, to describe how they plan to move forward, or to explain where they need help. Teachers receive a daily notification of the ‘Loops’ responses and comments that their students have left, so that they can follow up as needed.
“I like the Mote Loops feature, and students like it as well.”, says Daniel Lawrence, a Politics and Philosophy teacher at City & Islington College in London, UK. Daniel surveyed some of his students to gauge their preferences for voice vs written feedback, and on the Loops feature. The results were encouraging- 17 of the 24 surveyed students agreed that ‘“I like the option of being able to click on "I understand" or "I don't understand"’ . The majority also confirmed a preference for voice feedback over written feedback - you can see the results of Daniel’s survey in the chart below.
A bar graph showing student responses to a survey about Mote
Daniel also values the alerts that he receives from Mote when students use Loops to indicate that they need help.
Mote Loops prompts students to give a response to teachers' typed and voice feedback
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