5 ways technology has improved our ability to give feedback

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As a composition and rhetoric teacher and child of the digital age, I rely on software programs to help me evaluate student writing better. Here are five ways electronic feedback trumps my traditional pen n’ paper feedback:

1.      Digital feedback is tidier

My handwriting is very messy (“chicken scratch” as we say in my country). MS-Word eliminates this problem instantly. Perfect, clean, digital typing appears on student papers. This means I can worry less about students understanding my handwriting, (or about the awful image my handwriting sends out!) and more about the actual ideas I'm conveying.   

2.      Digital feedback is highly visual

Gone are the days when we had to have a rainbow of pens in our arsenal. Feedback via software helps students “translate” feedback more effectively. It allows consistent interactive comments, the tracking of changes, an array of effects, and many other options that, among other things, are practical and nice.

3.      Digital feedback is more efficient

There are many many ways in which digital feedback aids efficiency, but I’ll stick to two.

• Feedback templates: I created digital feedback forms on MS-Word with standardized feedback. They let me easily pick and choose pre-saved comments or tick different boxes. The resultant sheet seems fairly tailored to the student but is actually standardized and automatic in a lot of parts for me. 
• Archiving: I can save classes and classes’ worth of student material + feedback, thereby creating a valuable resource which improves my consistency as a teacher and provides me with examples and a comment bank I can easily draw on.

4.      Digital feedback “respects” the original text

I never did like the idea of whipping out a red pen and fixing every mistake – even though that method is actually easier in some ways. With digital feedback, we teachers can more easily provide comments while maintaining a clear visual separation between students’ texts and our intervention.

5.      Digital tools give me a global view of the work

When we’re reading a soft copy of a student paper on a word process, we can zoom back, waaaay back, back enough to see several pages all at once. When I do this, it gives me a broad overview and feel for the paper’s structure. Through that big picture view, I begin to visualize my students' argument. 

So there you go; just a few examples of technology’s extraordinary shaping of our discipline. To be honest, I feel we’ve only just begun to fathom what we are capable of.