TechQuest - Project Description (Update/Final)

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.

3.       A very useful resource that I located is called, Teaching Guide: Using Student Peer Review. It includes sections on planning for peer review sessions, helping students make effective comments, and helping students handle divergent advice among others. It will be important to establish a peer editing community that is rooted in sound pedagogical strategies if greater responsibility in this process is to be shifted to the students over time. There are tons of resources available on this subject including this Peer Review: Narrative from ReadWriteThink and this Advice on Incorporating Peer Review in Your Class from The University of Wisconsin Madison. Synthesizing age old peer review tactics, with new age technology solutions will be very important.

4.       Additional scholarly resources:
Providing Students with Effective Feedback
Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
Researched-Based Strategies: Providing Feedback

The Plan for Implementation

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.