Empowering Student Growth: Five Approaches to Delivering Impactful Feedback via Google Classroom!
Feedback is a powerful tool in a teacher’s arsenal. It helps to better understand and correct students’ mistakes, and eliminates them in the future. It provides a diagnostic tool the teacher can use to point out areas for the student to develop. Feedback is a very important factor in learning and can significantly affect a student’s attitude to learning, so it is very important to do it in a smart and responsible way.
What should good feedback look like?
It is important to remember that feedback is first and foremost for the student. It is also important to bear in mind that feedback is mainly to help and guide, and that your focus should be on the person to whom you are giving feedback.
Good feedback consists of 3 main elements:
- Listing and appreciating the aspects of the task with which the student has performed well
- An indication of the elements that need improvement or additional reading of the material
- Prompting students, what they can do to make their work even better, and in what direction they should continue to learn and develop.
Another important aspect of feedback for the learner is that it should be easily accessible to him or her and that he or she can go back to it and verify made progress in the relevant areas. Google Classroom provides a good solution in the context of feedback as it offers up to 5 ways to give it, which we will outline below.
#1 Private Comments
These are comments that only you and the student whose work you are assessing are able to see. There are 2 ways to add this type of comment. The first is to find and open the student’s work. On the right hand side you will see a ‘Add a private comment’ tab. In this box you can write your comments about the student’s work and give them feedback. The second way is to add it through the Grading Tool. From the Grading Tool select the assignment you want to grade and then open it. Select the student’s assignment file and from the panel on the right, select ‘Add private comment’.
#2 Grading tool in Google Classroom
A teacher can easily and quickly grade student work with the Google Classroom Grading Tool! It’s a simple tool that allows you to post comments on student work, score assignments, or add private comments, as we wrote about earlier.
#3 Comment Bank
There is also a comment bank option in the Google Classroom Grading Tool. As a teacher, you have probably encountered a situation when many students have made the same mistake and when checking each student’s work you have had to add a very similar or even the same comment. Never again! With the Comment Bank, you can create templates for individual comments and paste them in with a single click. How do you do this? In the evaluation panel on the right-hand side, you will find 2 tabs. The first is the evaluation and the second is the comment bank. You can add the comment you want to be stored and paste it countless times!
#4 Annotations on mobile devices
Many people don’t know this, but there are many options available on mobile devices that are not present in the PC version. One such option is annotating your document. With this option, you can hand-write your notes, draw, highlight and much more!
To find out how you can do this read our guide to annotation on mobile devices!
#5 Video feedback
To annotate your student’s work you will need to add the Screecastify extension to your Google Chrome web browser. This extension allows you to record short videos in a very simple and accessible way and automatically saves them to your Google Drive. To add video feedback for a student, all you need to do is link to the video file that is on your Google Drive. If a large number of students have made a similar mistake, you can also include a link to the video feedback in the comment bank.
Feedback plays an important role in both the teaching and learning process. We hope that the ways we have outlined for adding it will be a valuable tool for teachers enabling them to provide comprehensive guidance and assessment to their students.
