I recently switched careers from being an IT professional to teaching first-year college composition, so I am always very happy to find new ways of incorporating technology into my pedagogy. I was involved in a professional learning community in the Fall 2018 semester, and we were encouraged to look at an issue we had in our classroom,  implement a change, and record and share the results.

It was my first semester at my college, and they asked me to teach an English 1 course that had a co-requisite intensive writing course. It was daunting, but the department decided to provide all instructors with a set curriculum for the course. It was difficult teaching something that was such a different style than my own, but it was ultimately helpful seeing different techniques than I had necessarily tried on my own. My main concern, though, was that the schedule did not provide me enough time to review and respond adequately to each students’ first essay draft before they wrote their final draft. I feel that early intervention in the revision process is important, especially for students who need more intensive writing support, so this became the basis of my research question:

How can I efficiently intercede in the revision process and provide high-level feedback to my students on their drafts in progress?

How indeed? I did a bit of research, and found that audio feedback might be exactly what I was looking for. Here’s a quick summary of what I found from the research:

1. Audio feedback works! Students tend to like it, and it can help you form a more personal connection with your students;
2. It can be faster, depending on your process;
3. You can implement it utilizing various types of technology; and
4. Moving to audio feedback can help the instructor to focus on global issues and move away from correcting errors on papers.

It’s faster, students like it, and it could help me get out of an error-correcting mindset? Sounds like an absolute win to me! Well, it’s not quite that easy. Here are a few things you might want to think about before you throw away your annotating pen:

You need a quiet place to work

If you are sharing an office and can’t close the door, or if you like working in a cafe, this might be hard for you to manage. You will really need someplace where you can work without interruption. Also, you need to consider the students’ privacy, since you’ll likely be reading at least some of their papers aloud to them.

You have to be comfortable(ish) with the sound of your voice

I have done some audio work, so I knew that I would be okay listening to myself if I had to review some of the comments to my students. However, for some people, that can be disconcerting, at best.

You have to be organized

When I provide written feedback to my students, it’s easy to skim my comments quickly to see what I’ve said. With audio comments, there is no way to quickly gather information about what I’ve said about a particular paper. Therefore, I found that I needed to take notes before I recorded each piece of audio feedback so I could remember what major issues I wanted to bring up. It also is important to make sure students get their correct audio file back (see my upcoming post about the Nitty Gritty for details on this), so my electronic filing system became important as well.

It’s not for everyone

Not all of your students will be able to effectively use audio recordings. For example, students with processing disorders, students who are hard of hearing, and students whose English skills are still developing all might have a hard time understanding a recording without the added context of someone speaking with them. Plus, some students may just not have a private space where they can listen to a recording.

It’s going to be bumpy at first

Yes, even though I’m a “techie,” this process pissed me off more than once. I lost entire recordings multiple times and had to do them again. My cat knocked over my microphone while I was recording. I strained my voice. My email autocompleted the wrong student’s name, and one of my students got the wrong recording.

Having said all this, I feel that it’s a very valuable tool in my teaching arsenal. Check back for following posts in progress:

• Recording with an iPhone
  • Using the voice recorder
  • Using the Canvas app
• Recording with a Mac desktop
  • Using the Canvas website
  • Other apps
• Managing and distributing your recordings
• Unexpected benefits / pitfalls