Tools That Make Teacher-Student Collaboration Easy

Teachers replying to students with the specific objective of enhancing the student’s performance provide effective feedback for learning. There’s more to feedback than praise and criticism. It’s a never-ending cycle of evaluation, communication, and adjustment.

The usage of current EdTech can help with many aspects of offering feedback, especially during the assessment and communication stages. Of course, we also provide some suggested resources. One of the most effective strategies to improve student performance is to provide excellent feedback for learning.

Teachers can use constructive comments to start and sustain a conversation over time. Teachers can help students on a personal level due to educational technologies. Instructors can offer timely, effective feedback with the capacity to achieve better learning with the correct technology.

What is Effective Feedback?

Effective feedback doubles students’ learning speed. Not every feedback, however, is beneficial. And not all input that we think of constitutes effective feedback. “Information allowing a learner to narrow the gap between what is obvious now and what could or should be the case,” according to the definition of feedback.

That is, data on how well a student is doing in their attempts to achieve a goal. However, in real-world classrooms, feedback frequently falls short of this goal. Feedback is often interpreted differently by students and teachers. According to one study, teachers believed they were providing useful feedback.

On the other hand, trained classroom observers found that teacher-to-student feedback was scarce. The kids themselves stated that they only received “a few seconds a day” of input from their lecturers.

Professionals in education admit that effective feedback is difficult to grasp. Commentary on performance, action, or assignment is referred to as “feedback.” Effective feedback with the power to increase learning, on the other hand, requires very specific characteristics. Knowing and avoiding what isn’t feedback becomes the most crucial step in providing truly effective learning feedback.

Visual Feedback

Visual feedback is one important technique. Feedback is obtained in the form of a photograph, video, or work of art in this procedure. I just created a visual product using the One-Word Feedback technique, which was inspired by the concept of a word cloud.

I requested students to provide me with comments in one word. Then I assessed their comments and entered the information into a word cloud tool, which gave us a visual representation of the feedback. Using a Google Form with the question, One-Word Summation, I invited my students to offer a one-word summary of their first semester of class. Feedback tactics can be used in various ways to promote teachers’ professional development while also assisting students in meeting their learning objectives.

Offering this strategy to my students as a reflective tool helped me discover how to meet their needs as teachers better. Their comments spurred a debate on how to run class the next semester. To ring a bell and start thoughts flowing, I put the word cloud on a slide presentation. The pupils were then asked to write down their thoughts on the image: What did they notice? What did they learn from the experience?

We discussed the survey data and utilized them to reflect on their classroom experiences. We discussed what was working in class, such as the different types of texts, exercises, and assessments. We also discussed what they wanted to change. This form of feedback can also assist teachers in evaluating projects, completing examinations, or rating books read in class.

The advantage of adopting this sort of feedback is that it allows teachers to create a literal representation of the input. Instead of writing on paper, students and teachers can interact with the image.

Audio Feedback

Another option to distinguish feedback methods in the classroom is audio feedback. Mote is a fantastic digital tool that allows teachers to provide pupils with audible feedback. It’s a Chrome extension that helps teachers keep track of their reactions to student work. You can record your feedback by pressing on the purple “M” icon.

This tool can be used in a variety of ways by teachers. It works with all Google products, including Docs Slides and email. This form of feedback allows students to hear it as many times as needed. One disadvantage of using Mote is that each part has a finite recording time (about 30 seconds).

On the other hand, this tight time frame may encourage educators to think carefully about the quality of their feedback to ensure that it is concise and useful. Mote is also useful for universal design for learning because it offers a different way of obtaining information. Students can listen to feedback instead of reading it. They can listen to it as many times as they need.

Other Feedback Methods

Google Docs is another useful tool for sharing feedback with students during writing training. Teachers can utilize the comments option to give input on specific areas of student writing as they workshop it. Students can view this feedback, return to it as needed, and resolve the comment after it has been resolved. Students will see your input if they use the comments section, whereas they may forget about face-to-face interaction.

Because students cannot resolve comments on their documents until they are amended, teachers can utilize this tool to hold students accountable. They can make sure that the pupils get the criticism and have a chance to revise it. Students in my class are not allowed to submit final drafts if there are still comments on their documents. This allows me to know that students have seen and interacted with my input to enhance their work.

Teachers and students can utilize Google Docs’ chat feature to discuss their writing in real-time. All students will find communication to be highly convenient and accessible due to this.