Before I get to my evaluation, I wanted to share my first attempt at giving feedback using Jing. As part of our paper swap, Shawn and I utilized screencasting to provide each other with feedback on our TechQuests. Click the image below to view my critique of her work:
It was great to finally implement part of my TechQuest. Although it wasn’t on student work, I believe the premise is the same. I really learned a lot by receiving Shawn’s feedback in this manner as well. Namely, teachers will need to be taught how to create their screencasts.
I experienced this as well. How a teacher would normally speak to a student in a one-on-one conference will not translate well to screencasted feedback. The ‘umms’, ‘ahhs’, and pregnant pauses are no no’s. However, it would also be ineffective to script a screencast. So really, a big challenge of mine going forward will be iron out a technique that best integrates screencasting into the grading/review process. I realize that many of my issues can be better addressed once I’m able to implement it in an authentic situation but it never hurts to think ahead.
What stinks about how I created Shawn’s feedback is that she can only listen and watch me interact with her paper. Especially in a format like Google Docs or Word, it may be more effective to use the comment feature to directly tag specific areas of the document. This way, changes could be made immediately rather than watching/listening to the screencast and then making a whole batch of changes later. This would ensure that all areas of concern are addressed individually rather than being buried amongst others.
Most likely this could save time on the teacher’s end as well. Why mention grammatical mistakes in a screencast with it would be much more effective to just put in a comment tag saying “consider revising” or something more specific to the situation. When communicating a more complex idea, the teacher could create a short screencast and then link the student to it via a link in a comment tag. I believe this would better help the student because it’s directly connected to their actual document.
Establishing this process will have obvious growing pains initially because I plan to implement the feedback loops as soon as I get back to the classroom. It needs to be implemented from day one to have the most effect and this will be overwhelming. Personally, I foresee having an urge to downscale or even do away with providing feedback via screencast if I get frustrated with the amount of time I’m spending on it. For the sake of the project, it will be critical to continue to innovate rather than give in.
In the future, I think I’ll approach my TechQuest’s from the viewpoint that I will never quite finish them. Much like all things in education, my TechQuest will need to be constantly revised in order for it to continue to be advantageous to myself and my students. Therefore, when selecting a future TechQuest it will be important to pick serious on-going problems of practice.
Getting help and advice from peers/colleagues is invaluable as well. My SIG group members offered perspectives that made my project better, and hopefully more adaptable from teacher to teacher. Replication is a very important part of lesson planning to me. So in the future I will want to keep in mind that I’m not only designing strategies like this one for myself, but for my colleagues as well.
For the Project Implementation portion of my TechQuest, I created a podcast detailing what I hope will go well and what I may have difficulties with. If you're using an RSS reader to follow my page use this Feedburner feed to optimize your experience.
The feedback I received on my project description post last week was amazing. In my portfolio on angel, Susan mentioned that my TechQuest was starting to take on a two-pronged approach. Initially my focus was on improving the quality of teacher to student feedback all while reducing the amount of time and energy required to offer this process to students. I quickly realized that the best way to ease the stress on the teacher would be to share the responsibility with the students.
The goal has expanded to establishing quality feedback loops where students and teacher alike are active participants in the process. While each has different roles to play, I believe it to be the best way to allow students to receive timely, high quality, and time efficient feedback on their creative works.
I used delicious to pull together an annotated list of resources for my TechQuest. I had been using Diigo exclusively for social bookmarking but decided to test out Delicious and was happy with the results. I found that I like using the two in tandem. Using Diigo's highlight & post-it, and group features have been amazing for our SIG. However, I find Delicious to have much more efficient tagging and overall better look (which might not seem important, but when you stare at it long enough you begin to realize the importance). I initially was going to supply my annotated links using Diigo, but I was having problems with Diigo displaying everything tagged with "techquest". I triple checked the spelling on every resource and rather than drive myself completely crazy, I created a delicious account (so a yahoo account :) ).
While the tag searches within my social bookmarking tools led me in some interesting directions, my trusted rss subscriptions really got me started. I looked through the blogs that I frequent and skimmed through posts tagged with "feedback" and "peer review" yielding pretty good results. Many of these blogs have links to blogs that the authors read, so I started to expand my tag search to this second tier of blogs. Teacher blogs proved to be the most effective resource for me. I think that's because they have a lot of tips and tricks, where other published articles tend to be too general.
I was really happy to add five new blogs to my netvibes that I can continue to visit in the future :)
In case you missed it, Click Here for my list of annotated links.
This is an updated version of the TechQuest - Project Description that I posted last week. All new additions are in bolded green text. So if you read the previous post you may choose to skim through to read only the new material. Most of the updates focus on the peer review aspect of the project, which in theory will help with time management & students’ ability to internalize the review process.
Educational Need
One major problem within my personal practice is that I find it very difficult to provide students with meaningful feedback on completed projects or in the early stages of serial ongoing assignments. Common pacing guides restrict the amount of time that can be directed toward any individual subject. This often causes teachers to rush through the content and omit doing a thorough review because it would put them behind pace.
I believe that one-on-one conferences with students are essential, especially in my discipline of social studies. But they are time drainers. If I had a class of 30 students it would still take over a class period (perhaps more) to have just a three minute sit down with every student. I simply cannot devote that amount of time without falling behind the pace. However, to not provide that kind of quality feedback will cause many of my students to be left behind anyway.
In the past when I have tried to have individual conference time I have tried to spread it out over a number of days. Trying to have between three and four conferences while allowing the rest of the class to work on an activity of some sort. However, spreading it out did not help the process much.
I myself would be more worried about what the rest of the class was doing and thus the quality of feedback would suffer. The student could sense my rush and once they left my desk had already forgotten what was said about their work. Because of this, there was really no significant improvement on the work in question. In addition, there was no carry-over effect from the conferences on future work.
While spreading conferences out over an extended period of time helped to ease the stress of falling behind on my pacing guide, it made feedback delivery less timely. By the time I got to meet with the last group of students, we were already firmly entrenched in new content. This rendered my feedback all but completely irrelevant to students and thus the critiques were ineffective.
The Role of Technology
A future model must be able to address the current student work as well as help to structure their thinking for future works as well.
To address the educational need, the chosen technologies will need to do the following:
·Provide meaningful feedback to students on an individual basis.
·Offer a personalized experience for both the teacher and student. Trying to come as close to an in person meeting as possible.
·Reduce or even eliminate the amount of in-class time spent on providing teacher-to-student feedback.
·A real concern is going to be prep time. The solution cannot be to merely record what would be said to the student and then allow them to view it on their own time. This only frees up in-class time at the expense of the teacher’s personal time/prep time.
Research & Resources
1.The very first resource that got me thinking about implementing a technology solution to the feedback problem was a blog post about using Jing to assess online student writing. I never even thought of using Jing in this way. This technique would provide a very personal experience because the teacher’s voice would be included, almost like the teacher and student we’re sitting side by side. Since Jing captures all desktop activity it can offer interaction directly with the student’s work. The technology advantage is that it makes this process asynchronous, allowing the teacher to compose the feedback during prep time.
a.Questions to be further explored:
i.How will students be able to ask clarifying questions about the teacher’s feedback?
ii.Will composing the feedback with Jing save the teacher any time, or make the teacher more effective?
iii.When will the student view this feedback? Will they be given in-class time? Will they be expected to view it on their own time? What should be done to insure accountability?
2.I read a blog post entitled Bowling with Your Eyes Closed: Students Need True Formative Assessment. After the Jing blog post I was looking for other technology application tutorials that could offer more methods of providing feedback… I had great difficulty finding any. However, reading this blog post reminded me that I need to explore the pedagogy in finer detail so that I know exactly what I’m looking for a technology to do.
In the post, bowling is used as an analogy in comparison to daily student work. Both are repetitious activities, but repeated repetition doesn’t necessarily equate to improvement of skill. If a bowler is continually throwing gutter balls they are teaching themselves how to throw gutter balls. Only when they gain feedback on their game (bowler’s tips and tricks literature, personal coach, etc.) will their game improve. This is when they can reflect on what they’ve been doing and implement strategies for improvement. The same goes for students. If they are not given feedback on their work they will continue to produce future work of the same quality.
The blog post mentions the effect of seeing pins get knocked down. It’s instant feedback on the bowler’s progress. But this feedback can only be interpreted if the bowler knows WHY they got the result that they got, and how they can correct it in the future. This would help with the time factor. I must not simply give students feedback, but teach them how to assess their own work in the future. Teach them how to milk the cow. This would require significant time investment initially with diminishing time investment as the class progressed.
My focus for the duration of this course will be to identify technologies that can help to achieve the criteria established in The Role of Technology section of this post. Since I do not have my own classroom at this point in time, I will need to create a logical plan for accomplishing my goals to be tested in a classroom environment at a later date.
In addition to the role that technology will play, pedagogical solutions will need to be put into place in order to make their implementation successful. The biggest part of implementing this feedback process will be educating students how to recognize why we are doing it. If students are taught how to use critique to better their own work, this project will only be a mild success. In order for this techquest to be overwhelmingly worthwhile, students must be given training to use the technologies and thus provide meaningful feedback to their peers.
While the teacher will continue to provide feedback to individual students, having students take on this responsibility will instill valuable team skills in addition to allowing them to be more critical of their own work. Not to mention this will allow the teacher to scale back their role. Providing feedback to only a select number of projects, or only final drafts will allow the teacher to be drastically more efficient.
The danger of this process is removing the teacher’s presence too quickly. Also, there will always be reliability issues with the quality of feedback that students provide to one another. The teacher must carefully monitor this process to ensure that these issues are avoided or at least resolved quickly once they arise.
The Four Common Places of Education
·Teacher: The teacher will be responsible for providing meaningful feedback to students in a format that is personal and easily understood. The teacher should also be concerned with maximizing the efficiency of the feedback process (time spent vs. quality of feedback). Part of this will be teaching students to reflect on their own progress so that the student can assess their future work more independently. In addition, the teacher will be responsible for teaching students how to take on the roll of feedback-giver.
·Learner: The learner will be responsible for reading/watching/internalizing feedback that is given. The learner must be equipped with the knowledge of how to apply feedback to future works. The learner will also be responsible for learning how to take on the role of feedback-giver so that they may provide feedback to their peers.
·Subject Matter: My plan will be designed to be used in Middle School/High School Social studies. However, these tools will be able to be adapted across the curriculum as an aide to all teachers.
·Settings: Feedback content will need to be created during a teacher’s planning period. The environments in which students will view their feedback will vary. Initially, class time will need to be set aside to introduce this concept. However, after awhile I may be able to rely on students to engage with the feedback content on their own. Once students are sufficiently trained to provide peer feedback, in-class time will need to be set aside to monitor this process. Once students become efficient and comfortable with the technology/feedback process, it would be ideal to shift this responsibility to out of class time as well. Only through trial and error could this possibility be addressed.
