Session Description
It’s the age-old question: Do your students read your feedback? And when you’re in the classroom, do you know when your materials have landed with students? Feedback is difficult, and making it meaningful is even more so. In this session, we’ll look at three tools for making feedback more efficient, timely, and relevant to students and engaging for everyone: animated gifs, polls, and video feedback for assignments. We’ll practice using all three and discuss what situations might be best served by each method. By the end of the session, you’ll be able to implement at least one new tool in your classes immediately.
Session Agenda
- Discussion of current feedback strategies: what works, what doesn’t, and in what contexts.
- What problem did you come here to solve today?
- Overview of the three strategies with time to play with each one:
- Am I getting through?: Polls for Assessing Learning
- What are they thinking?: Animated GIFS for Immediate Classroom Feedback
- Meet them where they’re at: Video Feedback on Assignments
- The take-home: what is one strategy you tried today that you can implement this week?
Facilitated By:
Brenna Clarke Gray
Coordinator, Educational TechnologiesPlease email bgray@tru.ca to share your work or with further questions.
Register for a workshop today!
Try It Yourself!
We’re going to spend some time in this workshop thinking about how students can use GIFs for feedback on their learning. For example, if students could submit one animated gif to replace your course description in the university calendar, what might they choose?
In 2014, I asked students to write their course evaluations in the form of GIFs. I made an example for them, and two responses still live online: here and here.
Think about your trickiest assignment: what might students choose if they could tell you how they felt in animated GIFs? Check out the video for more discussion of how to do this.
Further Resources
- This video shows how polling is used in one Harvard graduate class to check understanding and stimulate discussion.
- GIFs aren’t just for the classroom — they’re the language of the internet. This article explains why, and argues that you should get fluent.
- Some instructors are using video feedback to show students what the experience of reading their work looks like.
- Researchers are proving that video feedback is more engaging, but the jury is still out about the impact on learning.