Teacher feedback

Make it timely

Quick feedback is more effective, so however you are providing feedback, make sure it is a system that you are familiar with. Both G Suite for Education and Office 365 programs allow commenting on documents, which you can use to give feedback to work in progress as well as on assessments that have been submitted digitally. Student work does not always have to be marked but should be acknowledged.

Tools

Learning management systems like Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams allow you to assign one task to your whole class, different tasks to different students, or group tasks to groups of students. You will be able to view any copies of documents created as part of the assignment and leave comments.

Video or audio feedback

Tone of voice and facial expression play an important role in helping students understand feedback. Using a pre-recorded video to provide feedback to all students collectively can also save time.

You can leave audio comments in many files types using Read&Write software or in Microsoft OneNote if you are using that.

Feedback on written work

Tools like Microsoft Office Lens allow students to scan their written work or drawings using a smartphone camera. You can also use tools like Adobe Acrobat to annotate student work.

These tools allow you to give quick feedback on:

• handwriting exercises
  
• mathematics workbooks (especially with more complex notation and graphs)
  
• sketches or plans
  
• artworks
• physical models.

Peer feedback

Asking students to give feedback to each other supports their learning.

In a remote learning context, however, some social cues are removed so scaffolding is important. If you want to run a peer feedback session, or include peer feedback as part of a project, you should model both giving and receiving feedback through whatever channel you are using (group chat, email, video chat) and give your students some structure to guide their feedback (like a single point rubric).