Growing Beyond "Normal" with Digital Feedback

When Maya Angelou said, “If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be,” her intent was likely to address a different definition of “normal,” but her words are absolutely applicable in today’s schools. We are at a turning point as educators and the recent pandemic has to become less about us going back to “normal,” or where we were before, and more about embracing growth and creating new and better ways of doing things.

Educators everywhere have recently been impelled to adapt and find digital ways to give feedback to students. Some of those strategies have persisted and even prompted teachers like Cathy Slagle, a business pathway teacher at Eaton High School, to provide her students with immediate and relevant feedback on digital assessments by taking advantage of the answer feedback option in Google Forms quizzes. This feature allows teachers to add comments, instructions, embedded videos, or links to previous course resources so that students can review missed concepts and even extend their learning.

Craig Hardin, another Eaton High School educator, uses Google Slides with his athletes as a creative way to review performance and prepare for upcoming competitions. Coach Hardin recently learned about the comment features in Google Workspace and has begun using written comments to provide timely, meaningful, consolidated, and personalized feedback to his athletes. Coach Hardin says that the team has found this extremely valuable for post-game reflection and says using this strategy for giving student feedback is saving him hours each week as he works individually with athletes in an easier to manage digital platform.

Patricia Smith in Eaton’s Business Management and Entrepreneurship Academy stated that she is “very excited to try out Mote,” an audio recording tool, as a different way to provide feedback for her Academy students. Not only is she using Mote to help record feedback for her students as part of an upcoming assignment but she is also having her students use it in Google assignments to comment and reflect on their work and provide peer feedback within their groups. Using resources like Mote allows teachers the ability to spend less time grading by hand and also engages the students directly in the feedback process. By incorporating a digital feedback resource into her lessons, Mrs. Smith has saved herself valuable time and empowered her students to become more active in the learning process.

Over the course of the last year, as responsibilities and approaches to classroom instruction have been forced to evolve, each of these educators are meeting their classroom needs by adapting the ways they give students feedback. These efforts not only save them time, in comparison to traditional forms of feedback, but the strategies implemented have provided their students with timely, meaningful, and actionable feedback that can be used for reflection and growth, allowing both teachers and students to spend more time creating and learning and realizing “how amazing they can be.”