Google & Feedback: Organizing My Toolbox

I've felt simultaneously overwhelmed and pumped about continuing to grow in how I effectively use Google to provide feedback for students. Because I've been taking a Google class and participating in more online PD discussions on Twitter and Facebook, I feel like I keep adding tools to my toolbox, but my toolbox is becoming really full and overflowing onto the workbench. 

It's exciting, but I also need to take a breath and sort through what I want to put into action (and how). 

I've already used Classroom and Docs for leaving comments for students, but even though I've used that tool for years, I'm still continuing to learn new tricks! I mean, how 'bout those keyboard shortcuts?! I've known about the Command + Option + M (Ctrl + Alt + M on PCs) trick to open a new comment; however, I recently learned you can easily post/enter the comment by hitting Ctrl + Enter. !!! Even that little trick can add up to SO much saved time. Love it! Google even loves us enough to create a whole beautiful list of Google Docs keyboard shortcuts :)

I also recently watched a Google On-Air Session about feedback and learned about the potential to use Screencastify to leave voice comments for students (here's the full session led by Oli Trussell--it was awesome!). Since Screencastify works so seamlessly with Google, I can easily record myself talking as I look over a student paper, save the video to my Drive, and include a shareable link to the video directly in a comment on the student's paper. I would file this under the "have yet to try but am VERY excited to explore" tab. 

Shifting to Classroom, I've done a little with using Questions to check in on student understanding and provide some quick feedback as needed. However, I feel like the Questions feature is one area I always seem to forget about for individual feedback; I tend to use it more for students to either discuss with each other or for me to get a quick vibe for trends on how the class is doing as a whole. 

I really want to focus more strongly on teaching students how leave feedback AND how to use feedback they receive, though. I've done better with this in the past few years, but this year I've kind of dropped the ball. Investing the time in teaching students strategies for leaving constructive and effective feedback helps them learn the skill better themselves. 

Helping students become more metacognitive about how they're using feedback on their work is super important, too. One feature on Turnitin that I've loved is being able to see whether a student has opened their document to view my comments; to my knowledge, Google doesn't have this feature. However, what Google does have that Turnitin doesn't is the ability for students to engage in conversations in the comments on their paper (which is even more enticing to me than the Turnitin feature--what's to say the student just opens the document and closes it right back up without ever reading the feedback?). However, I want to be purposeful in teaching students how to engage in conversations about their writing: paraphrasing to show understanding and questioning to seek further knowledge. 

Looking ahead, I also want to use Forms more frequently for quick weekly (or daily) check-ins on student understanding. Lindsay Welch's Slides presentation succinctly presents some useful options for using Forms as formatives, but in the spirit of keeping my toolbox manageable, I'm most interested in the idea of making a quick check-in to give students on a routine basis, asking a few broad questions:

• What is your biggest takeaway from class today?
• Why do you need to know today's learning target(s) for this class?
• Why do you need to know today's learning target(s) for your LIFE? 

Or something along those lines. Goals--one step at a time for implementation!