Teacher Feedback on Student Writing

When students are writing formal or process pieces, helping them improve their writing requires personalized feedback. Throughout the entire Draft-Revision-Publish process on Write About, teachers have access to easy and powerful instructional tools to scaffold growth. 

Feedback Overview

• Privately annotate any part of the writing
• Leave students a private voice recording for encouragement and instruction
• Leave students private text comments for formative or summative notes

 

Feedback vs Comments

• COMMENTS are 'public' responses at the bottom of a post.
  • Leave students Comments when you want other students to see your comment.
    
    • Any student (or user in general) who has access to view the Post (based on the privacy selection) will be able to see a Comment. 
  • Use Comments to model commenting strategies for the class
  • Use Comments to visibly celebrate student writing and writing moves in front of your community. [Commenting Overview] [Commenting Guide]

• FEEDBACK is a private communication between the teacher and the student author. 

• Students immediately see Posts that have open Feedback Items from their Home page Drafts/Posts area.

Students always have access to teacher feedback while they are writing!

• They can listen to your voice recording on demand, see your suggestions and edits, and mark Feedback Items off as DONE. 

A history of Feedback Items stays privately with the Post for the student and the teacher

• Feedback can be referenced for reflection and assessment either formatively or summatively (or both). 

How to Leave Feedback

It's easy! When a teacher opens a Draft or Post written by the student,

• Highlight any text to annotate

• Access the Record Audio and Text Feedback tools by using the blue Add/Show Feedback menu at the top of each Post area (below the header image) to 

• Edit or Delete annotations by hovering over existing highlights and using the 'pencil' edit button. 

How to Reference Feedback while Writing

• Students use the Show/Hide Feedback menu to display the feedback items during editing. 

Remember, not every student post needs to be "edited"! Students should have time to simply WRITE without needing to correct for spelling, grammar and usage. Balance your use of Feedback by simply encouraging them as writers alongside more detailed instruction and corrections.

Allow students to purposefully publish when the writing is something they are Proud of....(not always Perfect).

Their confidence as a writer will grow with more autonomy, and an authentic peer audience will help motivate them to improve on the details and structure. 

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