Teacher to student feedback with Google Sheets and Orange Slice Rubric add on

We know that providing feedback to students during their learning process is one of the most effective ways to help kids reach their learning goals (John Hattie, 2011).  Figuring out how to provide each student with specific, actionable feedback within the constraints of a single class period is quite a challenge for teachers.  Technology tools can be used by the teacher to shorten the feedback loop so that students know more quickly where they are on the learning continuum and how to reach their goal.  


This blog post will provide you with a few technology-based suggestions to help teachers give feedback more quickly.  The tech tools included are conditional formatting in Google Sheets and Orange Slice rubric add-on for docs.

Google Sheets conditional formatting is great for giving students feedback regarding whether or not the answer is correct.  A teacher sets up a spreadsheet so that it contains questions in one column A and students place answers B.  With a little preplanning on the teacher’s part, the spreadsheet can be formatted so that the color of each answer cell changes when the student inputs the correct answer.

This strategy could be a great bellringer to check student’s understanding of a previously learned concept, preassess for future learning, or loop back in material from units long ago. Conditionally formatted Google Sheets could also be deployed as a station strategy so that students can learn new content Individually, check their understanding using the Google Sheet, and then seek assistance from the teacher if needed. This strategy does require some teacher set up on the back end. See below.

Task level feedback is certainly a valid conversation to have with students in the classroom but often times students need more support than simply knowing if their answer is correct or incorrect.  This is where rubrics can come into play.  Grading assessments with rubrics can become a paperwork nightmare, however, and shuffling all these different sets of papers around for all the students we teach can leave a teacher to want to abandon rubrics all together.  This next tool, Orange Slice, combines student work and rubrics in a single document and adds functionality of color coding progress on the rubric and auto-calculating points to make the entire process much more manageable.  Check it out.

In an upcoming post,  we will cover how you can do some planning in advance to automate some feedback processes using two Google Apps: Google Classroom and Google Forms.