We frequently require students to work in groups for either formative or summative assessment activities. It can be beneficial to deliver feedback to the group as well as individually and there are a number of ways technology can help you to do this. Formative feedback provided to the whole cohort can also be beneficial as it provides students with an overall idea of common problems experienced by many students. For more on group assessment take a look at the Group assessment page.
Why would I use technology to aid group feedback?
- Provide feedback to students as a group and if needed individually
- Provide formative feedback during the group project
- Allow students to feedback about other members of their group anonymously
- Return students feedback to them online so they can access and review this at any time, any place.
- Use video or audio feedback to provide some of the detail lost in text only feedback.
- Provide formative feedback to all students about common themes students struggle with as part of their assessment.
How do I use technology to do this?
The tool you use to return feedback to groups of students may depend upon whether you have used any technology during the group activity. For instance if you have used the Groups tool in course resources this provides a number of features which can aid the return of feedback to the group.
Groups in Course Resources (Blackboard) – The groups tool helps you to organise students into their assessment groups and from this you can set up selectively released folders to deliver feedback as well as to a number of other tools in Course Resources.
Folders set up in Course Resources to release to the group – this tool can be used to provide a variety of different types of files containing feedback including Word documents, video and audio files as well as providing links to recordings of presentations (via Panopto) for them to review.
Assignment in Course Resources – If you have set up the Assignment tool in Course Resources as group assignment then you can also use this tool to provide feedback to students. Depending on the type of submission you can also mark on the students work, leave general feedback or attach other types of feedback file such as audio.