Feedback: Like Riding a Bicycle?

educator | musician | consultant
Jocelyn_Armes
updated 2 yrs ago

The start of the school year is like opening up the shed after a long winter to find your bike: you are excited about the adventure you have been planning, anxious about the state of your bike after many weeks of not being used, and pleasantly surprised to realize you still remember the combination to your lock (on the first try!). As a teacher, you start going through those familiar motions: making copies, putting finishing touches on your classroom, refreshing your bag of tricks for introduction activities. After you pull out the bike, you realize that – for the 1,000th time! – you need to put some air in the tires, and grab your hand-operated air pump. First one tire, and then the other. Twenty-five minutes later you are ready to start bicycling, albeit a bit sweaty! Wouldn’t it be nice to have a portable, battery operated air pump?

Bike metaphors aside, teachers know that it takes a while to find your rhythm again each year. This is especially true for some of our least favorite tasks, such as grading, or time-consuming tasks, such as giving feedback on written assignments. In the meantime, however, those bike tires keep piling up, and your arm gets tired!

For those of you with Turnitin Feedback Studio, you might not realize that you already have access to a state-of-the-art battery operated bike tire pump! If you haven’t used Quickmarks (in the Grading layer of each student’s submission), then you are missing out!

Quickmarks are customizable, drag-and-drop comments that you can quickly embed on student submissions to provide “where-to-next” feedback that addresses targeted issues in students’ writing, shed light on the relevance of that issue to the task at hand, and provide actionable feedback to direct students’ revisions. Quickmarks allow you to provide efficient, consistent feedback.

Other perks?