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Showbie
This video shows how technology can support both pupils' presentation of their work and teacher feedback.
We had started a unit of learning on World War One poetry. About a week ago, we’d looked at a poem called The Wind on the Downs, which a lady had written a couple of days after her fiancé had been killed in World War One So we started off by looking at the style that the poet had used and the children then went away and discussed and planned their own version, and then they wrote their own version in the style of the poem and the bit you looked at today was them…
how they performed it yesterday and recorded that onto their iPads and I went away and marked that using audio feedback and the children received the feedback and today they acted upon that feedback and hopefully improved what they had done. [student listening to their feedback] ‘A cracking effort. That’s good, isn’t it?’
Well, I think when children receive written feedback, as much I’d love the fact that they would read it and take it all in, given time to reflect upon it. I feel if it is audio feedback, they’re much more inclined to take notice of it. Initially, it’s because of the novelty effect but then they know that I’m right there… I’m giving them that feedback, it’s very, very personal and I can refer quite easily back without writing lots and lots of stuff. I can always have a conversation with them and then they can respond to that using the voice notes in Showbie as well. ‘That’d be a really good idea as well, yeah and then you can actually…
if you put a little note there to say that that’s Francesca’s, would that be useful?’ Children who normally wouldn’t be as interested in putting their ideas down onto paper, the fact that they are performing it, so it’s almost a different skill set, but I’m getting… the results I’m getting back are much more improved, so I’m seeing some really good stuff when it comes to using the audio feedback. I like the independent learning aspects of it.
Sometimes you might think, goodness if I send an entire class off to do their own thing, you never quite know what you’re going to get back, but because I think they were engaged in the task and they really enjoy that method of feedback, I was pretty confident that by the end of the lesson they’d have reflect upon what they’d done and produced something that was even better than what they had initially done. ‘Do you think we need to have a simile?’ ‘No, you could to do a metaphor.’ ‘I liked, a joy to be around. You’ve just said it. Do you think that sounds more appropriate? Read that again then. ‘I remember your personality, a joy to be around.’ ‘Sounds better?’
‘Yes.’ If you asked a child to perform a poem in front of a class, some of them, you know, have got the skills, will naturally be good at that. Some of them just wouldn’t want to do that but the fact that they go away privately and practise and manage to do that, it does show that different children need different ways of expressing themselves and this is an ideal way for some, if not all of them. ‘which makes me sad and I will never see you again but I don’t believe that you are dead. I know you’re still alive.’
I’m always up for using different ways of making learning more independent because you cannot have a pocket teacher, you cannot have an adult with a child all the time but if you’re being able to dip in and out of what a child’s doing through the use of a piece of technology such as Showbie, it really reaps rewards.
Going back to the poems again, I spent maybe half an hour last night listening to the poems, recording what I felt about them and that’s for 14 children so that’s not… that’s not a bad amount of time to spend on that but I think the value that the children got from that was much better. ‘Emily did hers particularly well so why don’t the two of you go off together? Do you want to do that? and have a practice of that.’ ‘It’s the environmental aspect that you’re not… I rarely photocopy now because it’s there. It was brilliant not to have to go into a lesson with three or four differentiated pieces of paper.
Now I just ping things out if I decide halfway through a lesson one child needs a different bit of a bit of paper to be getting on with, well I can just move it over to them and it’s not the stigma of, ‘you have that piece, you have that piece.’ They shouldn’t really know what each other have got unless you choose to do that. You can.. you get instantaneous feedback as well. They can share what they’ve done with you and the children really value that.
In this video, Chris Neesham, Deputy Headteacher at Ashford Prep School (primary), shares how he makes use of technology to support pupils’ presentation of their learning and subsequent feedback.
Chris shares how the use of technology has helped to make his feedback more efficient. In this video we see pupils use Showbie for presenting their learning with video (we explored this in week 2). We see how pupils interact with, collaborate on, and improve their work as a result of receiving audio feedback in the app.
The tool used by Chris is:
- Showbie – a free collaborative assignment tool
If you choose to focus on this case study as part of this week’s learning, you can share your initial reflections and questions with the course community in the comments space below.
- How might these approaches be applied in your own context to solve a challenge you’ve identified?
Whilst Chris makes use of iPads, consider what might enable you to achieve similar in your own context if you don’t currently have a 1-1 iPad scheme.
If you’re interested in using audio for more efficient feedback, you may be interested in taking a look at the ‘how to’ videos linked below and created by Harmeet Sahota and Kieran Briggs.
When you are ready click the ‘Mark as complete’ button below and then select ‘Next’ to see the next case study. Just keep clicking ‘Next’ until you arrive at the case study you’ve chosen to focus on this week. Alternatively, you can return to the initial menu of case studies.
This article is from the online course:
Using Technology in Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning
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Using Technology in Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning
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