Cool Kaizena Updates – from Greg Kulowiec on Free Technology for Teachers

This post, Use Your Voice to Give Students Feedback on Google Drive – Cool Kaizena Updates, first appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.

Kaizena is an outstanding web based tool that allows teachers to provide audio feedback on student work that has been created and shared through as Google Docs. Kaizena is not a native tool in a Google Drive account, but can be added through the Google Drive apps store.

Alternatively, teachers and students can go to the Kaizena website and connect the app to an existing Google Drive account.

Providing students with audio as well as text-based feedback, and getting that feedback back to students, can now be a streamlined process. Teachers can begin in Google Drive by selecting a student writing assignment and choosing Kaizena as the tool to open the document. This will automatically open a new tab in the browser and import the document into the Kaizena feedback platform.

Alternatively, teachers can go directly to the Kaizena website and pull any existing Google document into the feedback platform.

The process of creating feedback consists of highlighting a section of student work and tapping on the microphone to record audio feedback.  Entire sections of a paper can be highlighted or just individual words.

NEW Features to Kaizena

The most helpful feature that appeared in the recent update to Kaizena is the ability to send a feedback link back to the student directly through the comment section of the original Google document.

Now the student simply clicks on the comments button in their Google Document to find the link to the audio feedback.

Organization in Kaizena used to be challenging, yet a recent update includes the ability to create Boxes to organize document that have received feedback. These Boxes can be used to collect assignments, or teachers could make boxes for individual students.

The last and most interesting update to Kaizena is the ability for teachers to have a unique Kaizena URL that students can visit to request audio feedback on a Google Document. The unique teacher URL will appear on the top of your homepage in Kaizena.

Once students visit the URL, they are prompted with an option to ask for feedback.

The teacher and student workflow for this process is quite seamless. Once the student picks a Google Document from their Drive, they have to select the Box for the work to appear for the teacher. As previously mentioned, a teacher may create assignment-specific boxes, student-specific boxes, or potentially an “Ask for Feedback” box where students can submit their document. The teacher will receive an email indicating a student request has been made, and the document will appear as “unread” in the Kaizena homepage.

To learn more about Kaizena and working with Google Apps, join Greg Kulowiec for Google Chromebook & The Google-Infused Classroom in Cambridge, MA, July 10-11. EdTechTeacher has Summer Workshops in six cities this summer: Atlanta, Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, and Los Angeles.


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