Using technology to give effective feedback Audio Feedback and Screencasting

Audio Feedback Advantages of giving audio feedback instead of written feedback: - More efficient: in one minute, a teacher can say four times as many words as can be written. - More personal: in every study carried out on this method, students comment on the personal nature of the teacher’s voice, rise and fall of the teacher’s intonation, the fact that it is directly addressing the student. For example, the teacher can use his/her voice to emphasise the most important part of the feedback. - More purposeful: As a result of the above, evidence shows that students are more likely to act upon the advice if it is heard. - Easier to understand: One complaint students can have about written feedback is that it can be hard to read/understand - Easier to re-access: Students can access and reaccess this feedback on their mobile devices again and again and are more likely to do so than to dig it out from a loose sheet or from within their exercise books. - For language teachers in particular, one idea is for students to record themselves giving a speech/presentation, send it to the teacher and then the teacher sends back a new recording giving feedback on that speech. By giving audio feedback, the teacher can focus on specific pronunciation issues, which written feedback cannot convey.

Audio Feedback How to do it: Smartphones all have a voice recording facility and there are plenty of Voice recording apps available for tablets. I like to use Voice Recorder as it integrates easily with Google Drive, Dropbox or I can directly, so it is very easy: Record my voice, send an to the student with one click. Disadvantages: - The feedback may not be as deep or as focused as is possible with written feedback, especially when commenting on written work. - It can be fiddly to set up initially and people can find it weird to record themselves talking, but I feel it is well worth trying and sticking with it.

Screencasting The next level of feedback is screencasting, which is creating a video of the work being marked “live” with the teacher’s voice on top of it. Two good apps for this are “ShowMe” or “Explain Everything”. How it works: You start by importing (e.g. from Google Drive) a written piece of work or even easier taking a photo of a piece of work. You can then press Record before you use the in-app pens and tools to annotate and correct that piece of work. The app also records your voice which is talking the student through the work. So the student receives both a visual record and an audio record of the teacher’s feedback in a short video file that he/she can access in future. One disadvantage is that it can take a long time to process and upload the video, so when I do it, I have to multitask and do some other marking at the same time.