Feedback via audio recordings to help the weak third

through Jean Desjardins and Isabelle Senécal, Sainte-Anne College

Teachers from Collège Sainte-Anne share their winning strategies to support their so-called “weak third” students, without lowering their expectations of others. Today, we discover another strategy adopted by Gabrielle St-Germain, a French teacher.

French teacher Gabrielle Saint-Germain, whose we recently shared the strategy of creating an anonymous support space, also experimented with audio feedback to students following a task. This recording of thoughtful, posed feedback, as if we were in the presence of the student in optimal conditions, proves to be a very delicate way of individualizing learning and supporting the course.

The principles of the strategy :

• The teacher chooses a method to record his voice.
• In the recording, it reviews the learning achieved by the student and his challenges.
• The recording is then made available to the student.
• A feedback learning reinvestment activity is planned.
• Do not underestimate the length of the correction task. If necessary, we will want to prioritize the students of the weak third.

Added value for the weak third:

• More comprehensive and specific feedback.
• More human feedback: students feel pampered.

Tools and Resources:

• Your computer's recording application, or Read and Write and Permanent Clipboard, extensions of the Google Chrome web browser
• Also possible via Kaizena, a Google Drive add-on.
• Dropbox, Google Disk or another cloud computing system if you need to host audio files.
• Users of the paid version of Showbie on iPad also have a tool for this purpose, as do those of the administrative platform. Multi-portal of Plurilogic (to be validated for the other portals).