First of all we looked at feedback in general: What you give feedback for, when you give feedback, how you give feedback and then how long it takes to give feedback. Then he talked about how we know if feedback is effective and how we can measure its effects.
He asked what students do when they get feedback and we talked about ideas for helping students to benefit from feedback.
We then looked at a particular situation - a writing task and he asked us what we mark. The things he suggested were handwriting/neatness, punctuation and spelling, quantity and effort. I personally always respond to the content as I think that this is important, next I mark punctuation/grammar and spelling. Finally, if the writing is poor or illegible I point out to the student that it shouldn't affect the marks but imagine an examiner with a pile of scripts to mark and yours is not first, how will the examiner feel when he sees it. He will have to decipher the writing before he can mark it so he will not feel so happy and this will probably affect his marking and those few marks could make the difference between pass or fail or pass and good pass!
He made us think about what we expect from the students and from this I think that it is important that the students know what is expected from them and the criteria against which they will be marked. In writing, I usually go through the marking scheme with them so they have at least an idea of what is expected. (Angelos later went through this advice in the meeting he added that we could give students past papers and ask them to grade it with the marking scheme and why.)
When correcting Angelos said that we should also highlight the good points as it is more student friendly and less demotivating. He also suggested that we give the students a checklist before they start or before they hand their work in so they can see if they think they have met the criteria.
After the student gets a piece of writing back they need to rewrite it using the teacher's comments in order to gain a better grade. The teacher can also see that the student has learned from the comments and the student is more likely to remember the correct language - Learning through doing.
We next looked at actually giving feedback using a variety of tech including google docs, vocaroo, voicethread, pbworks (and wikis in general) and screencast-o-matic (and screencast in general). I have done a little work with google docs and I do make screencasts (and I use it to record some of the webinars :) )
He left us with a reminder about dealing with students work which is reproduced underneath
I found this a very useful review of things that I do or have done in the past and would recommend it for new teachers, to help them to help their students better.
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