We all know it: marking writing assignments is a pain. It’s long, it’s tiring, and what’s more, we don’t even know if our students will even read it!
Lately we’ve been thinking about alternatives to your traditional writing feedback and we’ve experimented with screencast technology. Essentially, you can easily create a video of yourself speaking about a learner’s writing assignment! Here is how we did it:
- Open Zoom
- Share a Word file with the learner’s assignment
- Hit “Record” on Zoom
- Talk to your learner about your feedback for 5-7 minutes
As you click “end meeting”, Zoom will start converting your file and create a video on your computer (or save the video to a cloud, if that’s your setting).
We have created a sample video for you to watch and maybe get inspired! In the video, the teacher gives her learner feedback on his IELTS Writing Task 1. As you will see, she highlights sections in yellow, deletes and re-writes things when necessary and speaks directly to the student:
We received great feedback from students on this. They find the videos more accessible and engaging. They also commented that they feel this type of feedback is much more personable and it is likely to be more memorable for them.
On the teacher’s side, once you get the hang of the technical side and you try your hand at a few of these, giving feedback also becomes more interactive and can provide a good alternative when you really can’t face looking at a screen and typing your feedback anymore.
Have you ever tried screencast feedback? Let us know in the comments section!
Do you want to learn more about teaching and assessing writing? Have a look at our best-seller course Language Teaching Methodology – try it for free!
