Top Three Ways to Give Students Feedback

Specific, timely and goal-related feedback is key to helping students progress in their learning.

In a bustling classroom with a jam-packed timetable, I struggled to find time to provide quality feedback to all of my students on a regular basis. With OneNote Class Notebook, feedback became a regular part of my daily and weekly routine due to these three time-saving features.

Audio and Inking

OneNote offers teachers the ability to mark and annotate student work using digital ink whilst at the same time recording audio feedback directly onto the OneNote page. I found that using a stylus to mark students' work provided a personal touch and showed students that their teacher had engaged with their work rather than 'impersonal' standard typed text. The great thing about this is that OneNote will automatically connect what you were saying at the time with any annotations you make on the page. Therefore if you are marking an extensive piece of writing with a lot of annotations, students can hover their mouse over each annotation and playback the audio feedback relevant to that digital ink by clicking on the play icon.

Tip: If a student has inserted a printout of their work to mark, right click on the printout select 'Picture' and 'Set Picture as Background' to stop the printout from moving around and causing your annotations to lose their alignment with the text.

The benefit of having audio recorded onto the page is that students can listen to your feedback as many times as they need to make the appropriate changes to their work. It also becomes a great source of evidence and acts as a portfolio of learning over time. If you prefer to type, you can also type your feedback whilst recording audio.

Peer Feedback in the Collaboration Space

An effective way to encourage peer feedback is by using the Collaboration Space in OneNote to share work in the classroom. A weekly routine I implemented in my classroom was for each student to share their learning goal and a piece of writing demonstrating that goal in a table in the Collaboration Space. Every week we had a dedicated time where students would read each other's writing and provide feedback on their peers' work. The effect of this was twofold. First of all, it enabled students to receive regular peer feedback and provided them with the chance to write for an authentic audience. The second benefit of this was that the students providing feedback learnt how to give specific feedback in relation to a learning goal, rather than generic comments such as 'I liked your writing, it was good.'

The specificity of feedback transferred across the curriculum, with students continuing to provide specific, learning goal related feedback in areas such as Inquiry and Maths.

In my primary classroom, my favourite way to frame feedback and feedforward with students was to use the idea of 'Two stars and a wish' or 'Two medals and a mission'. This coupled with tags in OneNote, made feedback an easy process for students. Read more about how I used tags for feedback here.

Stickers

A final, fun way to give feedback to students is to use 'Stickers' within OneNote. Look for the stickers with the pencil icon to create customised stickers with specific feedback for individual students.