Clips Power Use (CPU) #1: Feedback

One thing I like about teaching: helping students learn!

One thing I don't like about teaching: repeating myself.

One thing I love about technology: it helps me do the former and avoid the latter!

Use short videos to provide feedback to all of your students on commonly-asked questions! Here's how:

At the end of (almost) each class period, I ask students to provide me feedback with an electronic Socrative poll, asking students about the "muddiest point" ("What topic(s) do you feel like you understand least well and want more information about or practice on?"). I do two things with this information: address student mindset and provide feedback.

Mindset

Because I like to foster an environment in my classes where question-asking is comfortable, I take as many opportunities as I can to demonstrate to students how they're never alone when they have a question; that others usually have the same question that no one is willing to speak up about! And that's one of the reasons I get really excited about teaching classes where students use mobile devices to engage with me: I can provide them anonymous opportunities to provide real-time formative assessment information to me. So, I like to aggregate their results by summarizing their "muddiest point" feedback using a word cloud (e.g. using Wordle) and displaying it at the start of the next class period. This allows students to identify the most common responses (and, of course, it gives me information about what I need to reinforce, as well!) They see that they're not alone in their feelings about what material they want more information about.

Feedback

Last Thursday, one of the larger words was "consensus." I scrolled through all 72 of my student responses and saw that many of them were curious about various aspects of how to solve a problem I had posed to them during class using a Google Sheet-based interactive exercise (related to creating a "consensus DNA sequence").

I had realized at the ADE Academy this year that one of the great uses for video could be providing quick bits of feedback to students about their work. Because I have so many students in my class, I rarely get an opportunity to give all of them feedback on an exercise. So, now I use Clips, once I've identified those "muddiest points," to record video responses to supplement the materials students have to learn and to get feedback from me on their understanding. I post these on YouTube and distribute the URL to the students, so that they can access the information before the next class meeting.

Because I had found that "consensus" was a common request for more information, I felt it was worth the investment of the half hour or so it took me to make the clip above. Not only can I point all of my students to it, but now I have it for use in future classes, and I've already incorporated it into my digital class manual.

The biggest potential "con" to this approach is that immediate feedback is always more useful to students, so it does take our commitment as teachers to look at and process student work, and then respond with a Clips video, as soon as is reasonable (for me, before our next class meeting).

I used Explain Everything in the video clip above to demonstrate, with animation, how to "align" the DNA sequences by sliding them left-right relative to each other. That video, exported from Explain Everything, was then incorporated into the clip.