As many educational experts have said over the past few years, feedback is the single biggest significant improvement strategy that is available to us as teachers. There has been huge amounts of work both in classrooms and as part of research projects aimed at trying to ‘crack’ this. I have written up the findings from my own mini study here – ‘Is grading student work the biggest barrier to student improvement?‘
Whichever strategy you use, brings with it the same challenges – Do the students read your comments? Do they understand them? Do they act upon them?
One strategy that I have started to use with my GCSE students is digital feedback. By importing their coursework into my ipad using Dropbox, I can create a short personalised narrated video of their feedback using an app called Explain Everything.
Here is a brief example of one of my digital feedback file:
The benefits of providing such feedback is that:
- Students can pause, rewind, fast forward and watch the video again.
- You can highlight the area of work that you are commenting on, whilst talking about it. This makes it so much easier for the student to understand which section you are referring to.
- The feedback almost replicates a 1 to 1 chat in the classroom where you feedback to each student privately and individually.
- Students can watch the video on their mobile devices if they so choose.
Feedback from students on this method has been extremely positive. They have commented that they feel that it is a far more effective way of receiving feedback and that it has helped them improve their grades far more than the traditional written form of feedback that I used to provide them with.
Personally I find it quicker to record a short video with me talking through their feedback than writing out long notes on what they need to do to improve. However, I only use this for GCSE coursework where I provide detailed feedback. It would be unmanageable to do this for every group and for every piece of work.