Looking at Feedback Strategies on Written Work

This next session from the University of Wyoming Technology Bootcamp is on feedback strategies for written work presented by Rick Fisher, Meg Van Baalen-Wood, Tricia Giovacco-Johnson, and Kaijsa Calkins.

This session will explore approaches to responding to written work and other individual and collaborative assignments. The panel will talk through and illustrate their audio (podcasting), video (Camtasia/Jing), and written (MS Word) forms of feedback to students. We will also discuss our efforts to use comments as part of a larger feedback loop to promote ongoing student learning.

Meg is demonstrating adding comments to a document. She uses critical questions to analyze student work rather than act as an editor. She discussed the track changes feature in MS Word and the limitations. Instead, she prefers the commenting feature. She ties her comments to a grading rubric. Meg maintains a bank of comments that she reuses when responding to students. She uses color to call attention to specific parts of a document by highlighting. When starting a course, she instructs students on how to read her comments. Meg now takes in all assignments electronically.

Using color to identify needed changes

Rick highlights text both online and in face-to-face classrooms. He uses color to code to show students where they can improve their writing. He has a color key to help students identify what changes they need to make. He also uses colors in a rubric, e.g, stoplight colors. Rick does not specifically identify the change, but to self-identify writing issues. Rick also showed the compare feature in MS Word. Compare allows you to show two documents side beside to see the differences. This allows an instructor to see where students are making changes from one version to another. Rick finds that using colors makes him more responsible for his rubric.

Kaijsa focuses on a new approach, she uses her iPad to make written comments on a document. She saves the document as a PDF and saves it to the iPad. She opens the document in Notability, and writes on the document with a stylist. Notability also allows for comments. Side note: presentations are being served from Dropbox. Notability can organize documents in folders. Kaijsa pulls the document from Dropbox. You can also mark up documents on your computer.

Tricia uses Camtasia to comment on student documents. She uploads the videos to Youtube. Tricia saw the quality of student work improve because students could review videos. Tricia also uses screencasting, to highlight discussions from the week before and continues the discussion. These video highlights helped students for refocusing on discussions.

Rick points out that Jing is free and the video tops out at 5 minutes.  Kaisja uses screencasting to show library processes. It is easier to show than tell. Meg has experimented with screencasting and podcasting. She uses it more for earlier assignments. Meg feels that audio alone can be frustrating, images and or video helps learning.

The group asking questions about captioning, and transcription options. Good questions about Camtasia and other screencasting options. Discussing FERPA concerns and making videos private between students and instructors.

Additional Reading

• Book Review: Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes
• Book Review: Evidence-based Training Methods: A Guide for Training Professionals

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