How To Develop a Feedback Cycle with Forms and OneNote

Have you felt frustrated when your students don’t take the time to read and respond to your feedback? Yep, me too!

In this quick post, with an accompanying video, I explain how you can develop a feedback cycle using both MS Forms and OneNote to overcome this problem.

As much of my teaching and assessment is now digital I make use of OneNote all the time. In fact, apart from Yr 11 mock exams, I think I marked one piece of work on paper last term and that was a formal assessment!

“To ease the marking load further I frequently use MS Forms for quizzes, low stakes assessments and for retrieval practice. “

Everything else is marked digitally, with my students either handwriting their work on paper and then taking an image of it and inserting it into OneNote, writing directly on to their iPads or tablets with the amazing digital inking features in OneNote, or by typing their responses. An increasing number of my students also use the dictation function as well.

To ease the marking load further I frequently use MS Forms for quizzes, low stakes assessments and for retrieval practice.

However, one of the things I found irritating was that after students had taken their quiz in MS Forms and I had marked it, they rarely returned to the original quiz to view my feedback and to act upon it.

Whilst there is a way to see their feedback by returning to the quiz via clicking on the link students were originally given, I found that this is not something that students did of their own volition, or even know about. Therefore I had to find a way in which I could ensure that the time that I had taken to give feedback to my students was not wasted and equally that learning opportunities for the students were not lost. Enter OneNote!

How to return a marked quiz to students in OneNote?

Having finished marking and providing feedback for your students in a quiz you then print the quiz to OneNote on the desktop app. You select the appropriate section and student’s name in the relevant Class Notebook and print the quiz to this location. (See the video below to learn exactly how to do this).

My classes have a section called Retrieval Practice in their Class Notebook which is where I print their quizzes. After they have taken a quiz, they know to access this section, to read my feedback and then respond to it, either by typing, writing (digital inking) or by inserting a voice note. I can then easily access their responses, either during the lesson or at a time which is convenient to me, to see or listen to how they have responded to my feedback.

With this method, you are able to identify whole class and individual misconceptions and gaps in knowledge and reteach these points, if necessary. You can then build those topics into future retrieval practice quizzes in MS Forms. In this way, you develop a feedback cycle which assists students on their learning journey.

If you’d like to find out more about how to use MS Forms for teaching, learning and assessment you might find this useful.

As always, I’be be grateful for your comments and thoughts about this article. Thanks.

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