Using Technology to Create Learning-based Feedback
I've already written about my thoughts regarding the method of feedback where the students turn in their papers, the teacher covers it with red ink, the paper is returned to the frightened-faced student, and then the teacher makes them fix it. In case you couldn’t grasp my tone in the preceding sentence or did not read my previous post, I don’t like it. It’s not that I think it’s a terrible thing for a teacher to do. I just don’t think it’s focused on the right thing. Here’s why.
The paper, essay, story is not important.
Don’t get me wrong. It is important that students learn to write, probably one of the most important things they can learn, but the result of that writing, the product, should not be the focus. It is only a manifestation of what should be the focus:
The concepts.
Anyone can turn in a paper, see what the teacher marked, and change those things. Maybe it takes a few tries, but blind shots in the dark eventually hit something if you shoot enough. Does that teach you how to shoot well? No, it teaches you how to shoot quickly and probably how to cross your fingers for an extended period of time. I can't shoot a gun to save my life, but if you handed me an automatic weapon, I'd hit something eventually.
So how do we take the focus off the paper and put it back on the concepts? More broadly, how do we put the emphasis on learning something instead of the final score?
I have found that one of the ways to get there comes through technology.
Every single business either innovates or dies. Education can’t technically die because it will always have money from the government (hopefully). Maybe not enough these days, but still enough to be considered sufficient life-support. However, even if it can’t die, education can fall behind without innovation, and I think we’ve all heard plenty about how our education system is falling behind.
The confusing part is that this lack of innovation does not necessarily come from a resistance to technology. Teachers want to be able to do something better, but with all of the thousands of tools that come out all of the time, in addition to the hundreds of things teachers have to do every single day, it’s just hard to keep up. To help with this, I’m just going to show you just one tool, aText.
aText is a program that allows you to create different abbreviations that are connected to full comments, and it is by far the best things that I've found for feedback. aText is specifically for Macs, but you can use PhraseExpress, Texter, or WordExpander on a PC and get the same result. aText costs $4.99, but it is well worth the money. To use aText optimally, you need to figure out a way to have students submit digital copies of their writing. If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Docs is fantastic for this.
Let me explain a little more how aText works. I have mine set up with a lot of the common comments I make on papers and a number of the typical grammar or punctuation errors I see. Here's what the program looks like:
As you can see, the left side shows all of the shortcuts I've created. On the right is the editing side. I can create all the shortcuts I want and choose exactly what I want my comments to say.
For example, when commenting on a student’s paper, if I notice that run-ons are a problem for this student, I simply type “ro 1” (without the quotes or the space), and my computer will automatically create a comment that says:
“Run-on: Your sentence either includes too many conjunctions or is so long that it is hard to understand and follow. Look for ways to shorten your sentence if you have to slow down to read and understand it.
Information: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/598/02/
It takes me maybe a second to type what would have taken me 30 seconds to type before. Multiply that by the number of students you have, and you can save hours of feedback time.
However, the important part is not how much time you save. The important part is that the student now gets a description of their error, a link to more information, and a link to a quiz that they can take to practice the concept. This is what feedback needs to do. It needs to show students how to grow in their abilities so that they can become a more autonomous learner. Most of the time I don’t even highlight the error in their paper. They see generally where the comment is, and after they have learned more about run-ons, they can go back and independently identify the error and change it. That’s what we all want as teachers. We want students to be able to see their own mistakes, to recognize ways to make their writing better without constantly requiring a teacher.
Here's what this all looks like. I've written an example sentence (which is not much longer or more confusing than some of the sentences I've read in papers):
As you can see, the paper is in Google Docs, so I can access it from anywhere. Let's say I want to point this sentence out to a student. And for the sake of this post, I will highlight it in yellow to make things more clear. All I have to do is either click to add a comment or use a keyboard shortcut.
Off to the right, all I typed was "ro 1" (without the space or quotation marks), and that whole comment appears. They can now click on the links. For this example, it will take them to either the PurdueOWL website for more information or to Grammar.ccc where they can take a quiz on the concept.
Once they've learned the concept, they can fix their error. They can then click "Resolve" and it will essentially create a checklist of the things they revised in their paper for me, as the teacher, to see.
This requires that after every batch of writing that they turn in for feedback you need to take them back to the computer lab (or give them a class period with their devices, if you are one of the lucky schools doing a 1-to-1 already). Give them time to just explore, to read the websites, to take the quizzes. It’s not neat and tidy like we sometimes like to run our classrooms. Students are all doing different things and talking to each other, helping each other out. Even though it seems chaotic, learning is happening. Real learning. Meaningful learning.
I know that this probably isn’t the most detailed description, but hopefully it gives you ideas for ways to innovate your feedback to make it more effective and efficient. If you have any questions or other methods for providing meaningful feedback to students, please add them in the comments.