Providing Feedback to Students from a Distance

Providing meaningful, timely feedback is critical to student success and can significantly enhance student learning. When teaching a new skill, feedback is needed for students to understand what they are doing well and what they need to improve on. In a perfect world (a.k.a not the world of distance learning), I attempt to provide feedback within 24 hours. When the assignment is fresh in their heads, the input means more. The feedback can be used  to make their product better before they turn the assignment into me. I’ve noticed if I wait to give feedback, the student is already on to another assignment, and in many cases, they don’t even read the comments I leave.

You can communicate feedback in a variety of ways. In the classroom, I like to hold writing conferences with students individually. During this time, each student would read a portion of their essay (or product) to me aloud, and we would discuss what works and what doesn’t work. One of the (many) drawbacks to distance learning is that I am not able to conference with students individually. So instead, I’ve needed to look into new ways to provide quality feedback to my students.

In doing research, I found many feedback tools that I am excited to try out, but for the sake of quickness and ease, I decided to start by providing written feedback through Google Classroom. When grading an assignment in Google Classroom, there is a comment bank section. The comment back section “follows” you in any of the classes you create in Google Classroom, and you can build it as you go. For example, at the beginning of the year, you may want to start with simple feedback (punctuation and organization), and as the year progresses you can add comments that you’ll be grading them on or that you just taught (academic language or reminding them to add commentary). The feedback can be used to help students notice what they are doing well and what they need to improve.

Using the comment bank during distance learning has helped me communicate feedback with my students throughout the week in a quick and meaningful way.

Here is how you start a comment bank:

1. Open any class in Google Classroom in which you are a teacher.
2. Go to any assignment (cannot be a question, material, etc.) you have assigned where at least one student turned their work in through Google Classroom.
3. Click on the comment bank icon on the right-hand side. The first time you open this icon a tutorial will pop up to walk you through the rest of the steps.
4. Click on Add to bank.
5. Lastly, type in the feedback you want to give to students and add them to the bank

Using the comment bank has helped me so much over the past couple of weeks. I hope it helps you too!

Jenni Merry