I’m interested in how other teachers shape productive digital dialogues with students, especially while providing feedback on their work or responding to their inquiries and interests. I used turnitin.com last semester primarily for its multi-dimensional grading function that allows you to create a customized rubric, comment throughout the student’s document with both standard and customized marks, and provide an end comment in either text or voice. As I used the tool I felt more engaged with the student’s work, the grading seemed faster, and students were largely satisfied with the extent of the feedback. When I looked back at some comments I had provided, though, I was horrified by the number of my typos, which to me threatened to undermine the value of the exchange. Because I had a full-time course load with more students and less time for conferences, I also found myself engaged in more substantive email conversations with some of them. This practice became a two-edged sword: while I appreciated the opportunity for exchange, I did not always have the time for well crafted responses. When I needed to send messages to the whole class I used email, which had limited impact because it’s not their preferred mode; yet I am not convinced that a class Facebook page is the right route to take. My questions: What tools do you use to provide feedback on your students’ work? What standards do you apply generally to your electronic communication with them?
An excellent comment. I have had the same experiences. I still prefer “face time” when dealing with students but this is becoming harder and harder to manage. I try not to comment on substantive issues of students’ work over email. Last semester in an honors seminar for Freshman I did all correcting and commenting using the comment and edit functions on MS Word thinking technologically sophisticated students would find it easier. I found out that most of them had never used that function 🙂 I am not sure what that should tell me but for shorter assignments I do prefer this capability. I still go old school, pen, for dissertation chapters.
I do all my grading via the “track changes” and “comment” functions in MS Word, but have also discovered that students aren’t always familiar with this! I’ve also used Turnitin to check for suspected plagiarism, but none of its grading and commenting capabilities. Sounds worth checking out. But it still feels like whatever the commenting technologies used, we throw our comments out into the wind and rarely hear back from students as to whether they’ve read them, understood them or found them useful. I’d also really like to talk about how we can turn assignments and responses to assigments into a productive dialogue. “Face time” does accomplish this, but is enormously time consuming, not to mention the difficulty of actually getting students into your office!
I’m always interested in discussions about the tools that people use for their grading and interactions with students. I’ve been using iAnnotate on the iPad for the last two years, and I find that it works pretty well. And in the past, I’ve required students to write me a response to the comments that I’ve left on their papers, which helped insure that they were in fact reading them. I haven’t done that for a while, so it might be worth instituting again.
One of my colleagues invited her students to ask her (in writing) the question they most wanted answered about their final projects. She then focused her feedback on this question, and it saved her a lot of time. I think this is a brilliant idea to promote students’ self reflection and the idea that grading is a two-way street in some ways.
On another note about students and technology, I taught a really bright student how to double-space a Word document this semester. He really thought you had to hit return at the end of every line. A couple of them also found the upload process at turnitin.com to be a challenge. i’ve also had number of students completely miss the comments in Word’s Track Changes and get mad about the scarcity of my feedback. You just never know what they know!