Improving Feedback

This year I have been experimenting with a range of applications for giving feedback online to my classes. This started in a simple way, using Google Docs. Students would share their work with me and I would make comments. It was great to see how keen they were to act on my advice to improve the finished piece of work - even the normally less enthusiastic workers who see homework as a chore to get out of the way as soon as possible!

What was happening was that feedback was changing from being something that happened at the end of he task to an ongoing part of the learning. Even in the traditional end of task marking we are usually keen to make suggestions for improvements, but how often does this actually happen, if we are honest?

In teaching Maths I thought that opportunities like this would be quite limited. How often can students work online in Maths? What I hadn't reckoned on was how keen my students were to get earlier feedback. A few started sending me images of their work. Soon I was loading these into "Expain Everything" on my iPad and adding annotations and even verbal comments. Getting this back to the student was easy and just involved uploading the video to YouTube and sending them the link.

To make it even better I was able to keep the link to the file in another of my favourite iPad apps, iDoceo. I had wondered how inspectors will cope in this new age. The traditional work scrutiny, involving looking at student books won't really work as most of my feedback has happened online. In some cases there is little marking in the books at all n the traditional way!

I am in the early days of this, and, along with several colleagues, we are beginning to get requests for assistance from some of the normally less enthusiastic users of technology in the staff room. Hopefully this practice will spread. Watch this space...