Thursday, May 14, 2015

Kaizena - Authentic Feedback for Students

Teachers spend countless hours grading student work in order to provide feedback for improvement. One of the most frustrating parts of this process is watching the students stuff their graded work into their overflowing backpacks, or better yet, throw their work out as they leave the classroom. While feedback is crucial to their academic journey, it is important for teachers to provide authentic feedback that students understand and can actually use in order to improve their skills.

Kaizena is a free resource that allows teachers the ability to track and rate skills in student work, while providing feedback in different ways. Users can sign in with their Google Accounts and even take advantage of the Kaizena App for Google Docs or Kaizena Mini Google Add-on that makes it easy to utilize the tool directly in the Google Drive. Kaizena provides the following options for feedback:

  • Track/rate skills and rubric criteria - Kaiziena creates a summary for the teacher/student
  • Provide voice comments directly in student work 
  • Two-way, real time conversation in order to promote collaboration and communication 
Kaizena gives teachers the opportunity to provide fast, authentic feedback to students. In turn, it gives students the opportunity to hear directly from their teachers and communicate as needed in order to improve their skills.