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Audio Feedback

Page history last edited by pbworks 7 years, 11 months ago

            Audio Feedback

 

            I noticed that students in my performance classrooms were often asking me questions that I felt sure I had addressed in my feedback to their most recent performance, presentation, or paper.  I also noticed that students were repeating mistakes from one assignment to the next.  As I teacher I grew tired of writing the same comments on paper after paper, assignment after assignment.  In response to these concerns and a growing research interesting in digital/oral cultures and podcasting, I began to audio-recording feedback for my students.

 

     Audio feedback has become one of the most effective teaching tools in my performance classroom. It cuts down my grading time, increases student retention of my feedback, allows for more nuanced and personal feedback, and saves my wrists and fingers from arthritic cramping. There is a bit of an initial learning curve to giving audio feedback, but it is, in my experience, well worth the effort. In anonymous student evaluations of the courses in which I used audio feedback this semester, 35 of 48 students surveyed listed the audio feedback as the most effective learning tool in the course Web Mail.

 

           During performances or presentations, I write down notes in my own short hand while students perform.  Since the notes are something that only I will ever see, I am much more free to jot things that I notice about the performance as they occur to me without the need to censor and/or clarify them for my students.  Once I day’s performance are complete, I schedule a time to sit down at my computer with the notes.  I review the notes for each student and look for two or three key strengths and two or three key places for improvement. I then open my audio recording program--I’ve used both Audacity (free, open source, works on Mac and PC) and Garage Band (Mac only, very easy to use)—and record my thoughts. For most assignments I give between 2 and 4 minutes of audio feedback. I then save the files in mp3 format (to make sure that the file size is not too large) and e-mail them to my students as attachments. Depending on the assignment I usually supplement the audio feedback with a numerical rubric that helps students to better understand why they received the grade they received. The process, now that I have it down, takes about 10 to 15 minutes for each student.

 

          I have posted a link to a typical feedback session here.

 

          I have posted a link with instructions on how to download and record using Audacity here.

 

        Working with the “Technology and the Classroom” Faculty Learning Community has been an invaluable experience.  I have learned to use wiki’s for collaborative work with students, video podcasts, online quizzes, anonymous feedback loops using Google forms and lecture streaming among other tools.  Beyond the specific tools for my toolbox, however, I have gained an awareness of the ability of technology to enhance the “live” classroom experience. As a teacher of performance, I greatly value face-to-face interaction with my students.  The Learning Community has increased my ability to a) get “process” tasks out of the way so that more meaningful classroom experiences can have time to unfold and b) make “process” tasks themselves into experiences that more directly connect with learning objectives.  

 

 

 

 

 

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