Revolutionizing Writing Feedback

This is the time of year when my students would be working on research papers. It would be like pulling teeth for some of them, and for others it would be an amazing discovery and learning experience.

My students got better at writing research papers every year. I can attribute that to a few things: 1) I became a better writing teacher. 2) I started to collaborate with my peers and we made a bank of resources, common assignments, and common rubrics. 3) Along with that collaboration, we taught parts of the writing process in every grade from 9-12. 4) I used Google Drive for student work and peer review.

Yet, I have a love-hate relationship with teaching research and writing. I love learning new things, helping students find resources, seeing students discover something new, seeing students improve their writing and critical thinking. However, I dislike the hours and hours I spent nights and weekends providing feedback on thesis statements, outlines, rough drafts, note cards, and final drafts. Using Google Drive last year definitely helped to make this an easier process, but typing comment after comment is terribly time consuming, as any writing teacher would agree. Providing students with valuable feedback is essential to helping them develop as writers, but it just takes way too long. It's as if October and November of my life was nothing but the research process.

And then I found something that would change my life (or at least my social life in October and
November). It's called Kaizena, and it allows you to add voice comments to Google Docs and Presentations. And it does more than that. Here are my favorite things about Kaizena:

1. You can add voice comments. Now, I don't love my voice, but I can talk a lot faster than I can type. That means more comments in less time. I just might ask my students to bring their headphones to class.
2. You can tag each highlight. This allows you to connect your tags to your rubric and rate them, or simply give a :) or :( to each tagged skill.
3. You can preload and attach resources to highlights. Having a problem with run on sentences? Don't tell the student how to fix it, just link to a resource on fixing run-ons.
4. You can attach resources or comments to tags. So, when half of the students in your class inevitably incorrectly format their MLA works cited page, every time you use that tag, it'll attach the same resource. It can even keep you from repeating yourself if you tell it to attach the same comment as well.
5. You can color code your highlights. It takes so long to type comments that I always forget to leave good ones, but with the color-coding, I would challenge myself to use all four colors (I would probably make green for the good ones). Students would also be able to quickly see why type of feedback they're receiving.

Here are some other things I would do with Kaizena:

• Have students leave a voice comment initially about what they want me to focus on when I give my feedback
• Use Kaizena for peer review, and comment alongside the peer comments
• Have students do a self-evaluation, highlighting certain parts of the text (either chosen by them or picked by me).
• Have students reflect on a revision and talk about the changes they made

Here's a short tutorial I made on using this tool. What are some ways you could use this cool tool in your classroom?