5 best apps for teachers to give feedback on student work
Giving individual feedback to your students is important, but what are the best ways to do it? Reviewing work on paper can drown you in stacks of notebooks and just takes too much time. Choosing a suitable digital product might make you googling for days without a guarantee of finding one. Let’s try to make some sense of this topic.
First, you need to understand why it’s good to give feedback and how to give valuable feedback. There’s a lot of information about it out there. You need to consider all these things before making a choice. But since you’re here, I assume you are well informed about the benefits of giving rich and meaningful feedback to your students. Here are some of my favorite tools for doing that digitally:
Taut
Very easy to start using because of its full integration with Google Classroom. You can leave comments on student work and save a lot of time by reusing them. That’s the charm of modern technology—it makes you more effective. In Taut’s case, drag and drop comments instead of rewriting everything feels like magic, and of course, you have markup tools there as well if you need them. I like the dashboard that shows you approximate time saved on reviewing student work — it keeps teachers motivated. Right now Taut supports only image format (JPG, JPEG, PNG) for student work, but it looks like several other formats are coming soon. The feedback is instantly accessible for students and teachers can check if students actually read the comments.
Link: tautapp.co
Microsoft OneNote
A good product for collaboration in real-time, while also giving you a chance to leave feedback. They support different formats for feedback but when using it I ended up not saving much time on it. Students can write or draw on their tablets which is very cool, but if they don’t have tablets, the app is not as usable for them. The learning curve with OneNote is also slightly steeper than with other products mentioned here.
Link: microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/onenote
Bakpax
Worth to check it out if you want to speed up the marking process as a teacher. The app grades the student’s work automatically. However, it takes time to set up assignments and grading parameters. There is an assignment library that has some topics covered and you can pick from these, but they don’t get you through the whole school year. Compared to other products, it takes more time for students to turn in their work because they have to manually approve the content. I would also add that the automation takes out the so important individual touch from the feedback.
Link: bakpax.com
Floop
Similar to Taut—teachers can reuse comments, which is really nice. You can also hold a peer review if you can involve your students in doing that. The app was relatively easy to get used to, however, I did miss the markup options and if you use Google Classroom, you might wish they had an integration there.
Link: floopedu.com
Kami
Easy to annotate any type of documents, but built for PDFs. Kami offers a bunch of markup and commenting options that give it a modern and digital feel. While you can certainly give feedback on student work, it can be sometimes too much for students because of its complexity.
Link: kamiapp.com
That’s it, folks! I hope this article helps you choose the best app for yourself and your students. Stay safe!
