Technology is more and more present in classrooms all over the world. Especially now in Covid-19 times, teachers are relying on digital tools to continue educating their students. Many teachers are wondering “Do my students benefit from this technology?” or “What technology can I use to educate my students best?”.
To answer these questions, the author of Visible Learning1, John Hattie, published a new research together with Arran Hamilton. In their research they uncovered which education technologies have the biggest impact in classrooms. One of the findings from the new research “Not All That Glitters Is Gold: Can Education Technology Finally Deliver?” is that using technology as part of the process of feedback has the potential to accelerate achievement in education.2
Let’s see why feedback is so important for teachers, and what technology can do to support the feedback-process in your classroom.
Why is feedback important?
Feedback is important for you as a teacher to measure your students’ progress and to see where your class has a gap to be overcome in order to achieve a specific learning goal. Feedback also plays a key role in being able to respond to each student and realize who needs some individual attention. How else would you know, than by recognizing the learning status of each student, how to develop lessons and if you are achieving your learning goals?
Hattie highlights that feedback is not only a key factor as described above, but it is also indispensable that you receive feedback from your students about the way you teach. Receiving feedback is not always comfortable, but the benefit far outweighs the discomfort, as your teaching method can significantly improve if you embrace this feedback, according to the author.
What can technology do to support the process of feedback?
What do you do as a teacher to receive feedback on how much your students are learning? Probably create exercise and sample tests. This is a good practice, but you need to correct those manually which is labour intensive and takes a lot of time that you could use otherwise or invest in your students. Technology can make this feedback-process more efficient for you as. By using digital exercises or sample tests, you get an automatically delivered overview of your students’ results and you can see each student’s learning needs instantly. This means: no more time lost correcting exercises and tests, and more time for helping students better understand what they study.
Are you a teacher? How do you get feedback on how your students are doing? Do you think technology can support the feedback-process for teachers? Let us know on our social media channels!
Sources:
1 Learn more at www.visiblelearningplus.com.
2 “Not All That Glitters Is Gold: Can Education Technology Finally Deliver?” by Arran Hamilton and John Hattie, 2021.
