Floop (Collaborative feedback platform)
"We all need people who give us feedback. That’s how we improve." — Bill Gates
Most of the subjects involve a lot of manual work with paper and pencil, like drawing and sketching solutions. And oftentimes it gets difficult to take advantage of the affordances of digital technology to give timely and targeted feedback because of the limitations inherent in digitising student work and then trying to annotate the work using digital tools. It’s just clunky.
From research and our own experience, we know that feedback is the most impactful driver of student learning outcomes. However, teachers struggle to give enough timely feedback to make a difference. Then, when students get feedback, they don’t always use it to learn. Research tells us that in addition to students receiving actionable information, students also need to develop feedback literacy and the agency to act on their feedback.
So here's a tool and can help you simplify the job of giving feedback. Floop is a browser-based & mobile tool that eases the process of providing students with digital, interactive annotated feedback on their paper-based assignments and it’s available on all platforms. With Floop, students can submit their assignments by snapping a photo of their worksheet or document and uploading it online. Teachers and classmates can post comments and mark-up a student’s document digitally. Students can see and respond to feedback instantly or ask questions privately in order to enhance their learning. With mobile-friendly feedback tools, teachers give meaningful feedback faster and students learn to engage with feedback. Teachers build a bank of drag-and-drop comments over time, which increases efficiency. The video below does a better job than I can explain how it works.
Floop provides an excellent companion Feedback Literacy Curriculum to support its use. I highly recommend having a look at it as I found a few sections particularly interesting; like a Feedback Literacy Survey designed to measure knowledge, beliefs and behaviours related to feedback; a Feedback Literacy Rubric that could help students understand what Feedback Literacy is; and a number of well-designed lesson plans (noteworthy among them is 'Learning to Love Mistakes'.)
Some suggested learning activities
Math
Students can submit math worksheets, sketch notes related to a math topic, or even paper-based infographics featuring data about a topic of interest, and provide feedback on their peers’ submissions.
Science
Students can submit diagrams or images of science experiments or pages from their science journals. Students can also leave certain aspects of their diagram blank and have their classmates fill in the blank through the comments feature.
English/Language Arts
Students can submit hand-drawn movie posters for a book, annotated maps that visualize the movement of a character in a story, or photos of a hand-made art project representing a scene from a book.
History/Social Studies
Students can submit drawings that represent an important historic event/figure, maps that visualize a series of events of a historical point in time, and sketches of scenes from certain a historical figure’s life.
Other
Teachers can post a study guide as an assignment to the whole class. Students can print out and annotate the study guide, snap a photo, and send it back to the teacher to provide clarification and feedback. Consider pairing Floop with a tool like Flipgrid or Screencast-o-
By giving and receiving feedback and iterating on work, students develop the feedback literacy skills they need in class and in life. Far too often, technology is used as a direct substitute for other low-tech tools (e.g., pencil and paper). While substitution has some benefits (e.g., students develop their technical skills and knowledge), it's now time to think about how we might use Floop to modify or redefine learning.
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