Community Clips for Written Feedback

Do you ever have students ask questions, questions, questions, when they receive a writing back?  I've always found that giving constructive feedback for my students has been a balancing act: Try to give them as much information as I can about the writing and yet not spend half an hour a paper.

Solution? Record yourself looking at a student's paper.

So in conjunction with the macros I have set up on my Word (go here if you would like to do it for yourself), I decided to try using a screen-cast, something that records my computer screen and voice, as I look over a paper.

The Idea

While you are giving feedback, however you give feedback, record the paper and your voice.  This way you can show they what is wrong and how to fix it while you are doing it.  You then make the video available to the students.  They can go over and fix their mistakes at their own speed.

This can not only save you class time by not having to spend as much time assisting individual students, but also the students can watch the video as much as they need to make the corrections.

You can do this in conjunction with how you already give feedback.

How to

Set Up

Set up a way for students to send you their written work.  You can use something as easy as email for this.  This is a perfect time to use Edmodo however.  It is a great tool and really easy to use.  You also don't have to worry about organizing things, searching through your email, or even giving away anything personal.

Get a Program

Download something to do a screen-cast.  I like CommunityClips.  It is easy, it does everything I want, and it does it for free.  There are others though, such as ScreenCast-o-Matic, though it leaves a watermark.

Record

While you look at the writing from the student, record yourself speaking the comments and how to fix it (or whatever you like to do).  Try to to have too much dead sound while you are doing it.  I try to read the paper out loud to them if I found myself silent for a time.  Community Clips (and I assume others) has a pause button, so you can take breaks or give yourself time to think.

Send back

Email or upload back to the students.  With Edmodo, this is super slick.  You can create an assignment and send it back to them really easily.  Other options would be to put on Youtube or some other share site.  The disadvantage here is that anyone can see it.

If you can think of any other good vessels of delivery, please write a comment!

Example

If you would like to set up the buttons (macros which make the grammar comments without me having to type it in), read this older post.

What would you do?

What do you think? Are you scared about the amount of work it would take? What kind of variations would you make?  Make a comment!