Feedback 2.0

One beautiful thing about the Web is that it provides creators with an authentic audience for their work. Web 2.0 makes it easy for others to give feedback and engage in meaningful conversations without distance being a barrier. As an educator, Web 2.0 tools allow me to comment on students' work and collaborate in dynamic partnerships with other educators around the world. In my role as Director of Teacher Education, I use Web tools to give feedback to students in my classes and to interns and student teachers working in local classrooms. I also gather feedback from others regularly via the Web. Keep reading to learn about a few of the tools I use to give and get feedback. This list isn't comprehensive by any means, but these are tools that have worked for me and might work for you.

Edmodo
I've written in the past about how I use Edmodo as a Learning Management System for a course I teach for pre-service teachers on technology integration. All assignments for the course are submitted via Edmodo, and I provide feedback through Edmodo as well. Edmodo allows me to go paperless, and it makes giving feedback simple and efficient. When students submit assignments, they can upload documents or links or simply type their response to the assignment. With each submitted assignment, I can provide feedback in a variety of ways. By commenting on student work that's been submitted through Edmodo, I can tell students what they did well and ask questions to find out more or ask them to think more deeply about the topic. Along with my comment, I can also upload a document, a URL, or a link to an item in my Edmodo Library. I use this feature to attach completed rubrics to submitted work. Leaving a comment and attaching the rubric I used to evaluate student work allows me to provide a comprehensive explanation to students regarding their progress toward learning goals. Another handy Edmodo feature is the annotate tool. Edmodo makes it easy to open a student's attachment and annotate directly on the document by leaving comments, highlighting, drawing, or adding a text box. I assign a grade to some assignments as well, and Edmodo graphs students' weekly progress, allowing them to visually see how they are progressing from week to week.

Penzu
The interns and student teachers I supervise are required to submit a weekly reflection on their experiences out in the field. In the past, they have used paper field reports to do this. Like most areas of my work, I searched for a way to make the process digital and more efficient. This semester, my interns and student teachers are using Penzu for their weekly reflections. They each set up their own online journals at the beginning of the semester, and they add a new entry (or entries) each week. When a student completes a new entry, he/she shares it with me using Penzu's sharing feature. I receive an email notification each time an entry has been shared with me. While I was typing this post, I received a notification that a student has shared a new entry with me. There are three ways for me to comment. 1) There's a link within the email notification that will take me to Penzu and allow me to read the reflection and comment on it online. 2) There's also a link within the email notification which I can click to leave a comment with just one step. 3) I can reply to the email notification with my comment, and my comment will be added to the student's entry. There is a free Penzu app that allows you to create and post to a journal, but the free app doesn't allow commenting on others' entries. In order to use the app to leave comments, you have to sign up for a Penzu Pro account. One Penzu feature I've learned about since the start of the semester is Penzu Classroom, which allows a teacher to set up a class account and give students a code to create their own journals within the class. The teacher can then comment on all student entries and grade them within the Penzu Classroom. Students can choose to share their entries with their classmates in order to generate a conversation around a topic, which is a helpful feature. Penzu Classroom costs $49 a year, but it might be worth it in order to make managing and responding to student journals more efficient and have access to additional features.

Evernote
I use Evernote for just about everything: note-taking, lesson planning, brainstorming, student observation feedback, grocery-list-making, the list goes on. I love the way Evernote lets me capture ANYTHING in a note - text, a photo, a video, an audio file, an attachment, a web page. I often take pictures of handouts from meetings or class that I don't want to hang onto anymore and add them to notebooks. Evernote allows me to search through all notes for a key word. It even searches within attachments and text or handwritten words in pictures that have been uploaded. Here are just a few cool things you can do with Evernote:

• take a picture of a whiteboard from a brainstorming session to capture what was shared
• clip a section of text and/or images from the Web and add your own notes
• take a picture of a newspaper article or store circular 
• send a tweet or email to Evernote and add your own notes
• share notes and notebooks with others

I use Evernote to take notes during intern or student teacher observations and to record my feedback on lesson plans that have been submitted. I've set up a notebook for the students I supervise, and I keep a record of all of my communication with them through those notebooks. Each week when lesson plans are submitted, I upload the lesson plans into a note and add my feedback. Evernote makes it easy to share notes or entire notebooks with others. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a task that you couldn't complete in Evernote. 

Google Forms
Google Forms is one of my favorite tools for gathering feedback from others. I use Google Forms to get feedback from students on how class is going, for registration forms, to gather information from cooperating teachers, etc. My absolute favorite feature of Google Forms is the Spreadsheet that is automatically generated as soon as you create a Form. Each time someone submits the Form, a new row is added to the spreadsheet. Then, within the Spreadsheet, I can easily sort and analyze the feedback I've collected. The Summary feature within the Spreadsheet displays a visual summary of the data collected, including circle and bar graphs (click Form > Show summary of responses).

Recently, the students in my technology class were asked to visit three classroom webpages and fill out a Google Form to evaluate those webpages. Upon completion of the assignment, I displayed the Google Spreadsheet and the summary of responses while the students and I discussed themes and trends across the data that were collected. Google Forms makes the process of collecting and analyzing feedback just about as simple as it can get.

Socrative, Poll Everywhere, and Wallwisher
In a previous post, I wrote about how I use Socrative, Poll Everywhere, and Wallwisher for formative assessment. I use these tools often to assess student progress toward learning goals and identify ways I need to adjust my instruction. I also use these tools to gather non-academic feedback. I often begin and end professional development sessions with one of these tools to find out what participants already know, what they want to know, what they learned, and what they plan to do next. I also use these tools in a similar way in the classes I teach, asking students to give me feedback on which components of class are working for them and which aren't and to make suggestions on things we might do differently. All three tools are user-friendly and easily accessible from a variety of devices.

How do you use Web 2.0 tools to give and get feedback? Please comment with your own ideas and any questions you might have. Commenting on a blog post is an easy way to provide your own feedback!

LiveBinders Might be the Answer to your Question

In my last post, I wrote about my plans for using social media tools in my education courses this fall. In addition to using Edmodo, Twitter, and Pinterest, my students and I will be using LiveBinders throughout the semester to organize, share, and reflect on resources and their applications. I use LiveBinders as an instructional tool because of the ease with which I can organize resources around topics and concepts. My primary use of Livebinders this semester, however will be as a tool for my students - who are pre-service teachers - to organize and reflect on resources for their future classrooms.

Q & A

I'm teaching Inclusive Language Arts Methods for Elementary Education majors for the first time this semester. Over the summer, I discovered just how much work it is to create a course from scratch. As I began planning for the course, early on I knew that I wanted some way for my students to create a database of strategies and resources for teaching language arts that they can access when they graduate and get teaching positions in a year. I use my university's learning management system (LMS) to organize resources throughout the semester, but my students won't have access to the LMS next year when they'll need those resources. I also run mostly paperless classes, so I won't be giving them hard copies of resources to file away for later.

So, my question was: What tool can my students use to organize strategies and resources they learn about throughout this semester? My criteria: free; simple user interface; easy to share; and capable of organizing various types of media including documents, videos, and web resources. The answer: LiveBinders.

My students will create a LiveBinder to organize resources and strategies as well as reflect on the potential applications of those strategies and resources in their future classrooms. The faculty who teach the other Elementary methods courses (social studies, science, and math) have agreed to use LiveBinders this semester as well. These methods courses take place during the students' Internship semester, when students spend one full day a week in a local classroom. Students complete their Internship in the classrooms in which they will complete their student teaching in the spring. Building this LiveBinder during their Internship will give them a head start on taking on full responsibility for teaching in the spring.

The Nitty Gritty

Each student will create a LiveBinder with 4 tabs - one for each content area methods course. Each tab will contain several subtabs which will vary from course to course, depending on what each professor requires of students. My students will upload their assignments along with documents and web resources they can use in their future classrooms. One major component of the LiveBinder assignment is reflection. I want these future teachers to be explicit about how they might use these resources and strategies in their classrooms. Here are the things I am requiring my students to include in their LiveBinders:

• Course syllabus (I want them to have access to the list of additional resources in the future)

• Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and other relevant supporting documents and resources to the CCSS

• Mini-lesson script, reflection, and other artifacts from the lesson

• Small group lesson plan, reflection, and other artifacts from the lesson

• Anecdotal records and audio or video recording from two student conferences

• Read aloud reflection

• Four entries from your writer’s notebook that represent different types of entries and demonstrate who you are as a writer

• Published piece of writing (or a sample of your published piece)

• A minimum of five reading and writing web resources that you plan to use in your classroom, along with a brief reflection on how you plan to use each resource

• A minimum of ten documents that you plan to use in your classroom, along with a brief reflection on how you plan to use each document (i.e. handouts from class, resources from the textbook’s CD, resources from your cooperating teacher, etc.)

Potential Benefits

Hopefully by the end of the semester I will be able to proclaim how beautifully this LiveBinders assignment worked as a teaching, learning, and reflecting tool for these pre-service teachers. Until the results are in, here are my hopes:

• Consistency across the four methods courses will help our students make connections across content areas and begin to think about teaching in a more connected way
• Students will feel more prepared for student teaching and for their first year as classroom teachers
• Students will become more reflective as they consider potential applications of strategies and resources 
• Students will become familiar with a tool they can use to organize resources for their future students and as a learning tool in their future classrooms

Are you searching for a tool that fits a specific purpose in your own classroom? LiveBinders might be the answer. I would love to help you think about the right tool for the job. Feel free to leave a comment below! 

Social Media as a Learning Tool in Higher Education

This fall, I'm teaching two sections of Technology in the Classroom and one section of English Language Arts Methods for Elementary Education majors. The campus, which has been eerily quiet this summer, will once again come to life as students return this week. I'm looking forward to daily face-to-face interactions with the pre-service teachers I have the privilege of working with, but I'm also excited about online interactions with those students via social media tools. I'm incorporating social media in different ways in my two courses. I'll be continuing some ideas from last semester, and there are a few new ideas that I'm experimenting with as well. I'd love to get your feedback about how you're using social media with your K-12 or higher ed students! Feel free to leave a comment below.

Edmodo 

I use Edmodo as the Learning Management System for my Technology in the Classroom course. While the university provides an LMS for instructors and students, I chose Edmodo for this particular course because I want to model a tool that my students (pre-service teachers) can use in their future classrooms. Feedback from students in my course last spring was very positive in regards to using Edmodo as a teaching and learning tool. Many of them taught their cooperating teachers how to use Edmodo and used it as a classroom website during their student teaching. Edmodo helped me implement an entirely paperless classroom during the spring semester. All instructional resources are posted online, and students submit all assignments via Edmodo. Read more about how I use Edmodo as my LMS here.

Twitter

One ongoing assignment in Technology in the Classroom is building a Personal Learning Network, and Twitter is the main tool we use to do that. I require my students to follow educators and organizations who share similar interests. Students also are expected to tweet reflections on course-related content throughout the semester, mainly by replying to questions I tweet. I created a hashtag for the course, #edu451, which helps me and my students organize our thinking and connect with one another.

One change I've made to how I'm using Twitter in my Technology in the Classroom course is that this fall I'll be requiring my students to participate in one Twitter chat sometime throughout the semester. I scheduled a Twitter chat with my class in place of a face-to-face meeting one week last semester when I was away at a conference, and the chat was a big hit. I'm planning to hold an online class meeting via Twitter chat again this fall. Additionally, my students will choose a Twitter chat that's focused on their interests, participate in the chat, and turn in a reflection on their participation in the chat. I'll be sharing this schedule with them.

Pinterest

I'm trying Pinterest with my students for the first time this fall. This is the primary social media tool I'll be using in my English Language Arts Methods course. I've created a board for my students to follow. Over the summer, I posted web resources, graphics, and ideas that will be useful to them. During the first week of class, I'm going to add my students as editors of the board so they can post resources as well. A benefit of using Pinterest as a way to capture and organize resources is that my students will have access to this board next year, when they are first-year teachers in their own elementary classrooms. They can also share the board with their cooperating teachers and other colleagues. I envision having students share not only great websites with each other but also upload their ideas and products from inside and outside of class. With the Pinterest app, students can easily upload a variety of items that will be helpful learning resources for their classmates. Here are some things I envision being added to our board:

• a photo of a two-column chart generated during a small group activity in class
• a photo of elementary students working in a literacy station in an Internship classroom
• a photo of marked-up text representing a key learning from the week's reading
• a photo of an anchor chart created during class as a response to readings or discussions

Read my guest posts on Free Technology 4 Teachers in which I detail my experiences last spring: initial post and follow-up post.