Category: Education

10 tips on how to give feedback effectively

20 November 2023

Effective feedback is crucial for students’ progress and plays an indispensable role in their learning process. What exactly should you pay attention to in order to give the most effective and constructive feedback possible? Read the tips here!

  1. Focus on the goal: Feedback is meant to steer learners towards specific goals. What exactly is that goal? Feedback should show students how many more steps need to be taken to reach that goal.
  2. Make feedback transparent and tangible: Indicate concrete results that are related to the intended goal.
  3. Provide action-oriented information: Good feedback contains action-oriented information. Just ‘well done’ or ‘try to do better next time’ is not enough. Make it clear what exactly is good about it or not so that a student knows what exactly to adjust. An example is: ‘This particular argument lacks foundation, in chapter two you will find information that can help with this.’
  4. Focus feedback on the work and the process, not on personal traits. Avoid statements like “You didn’t approach that cleverly”. Someone may then think you think the person is stupid. Instead, say, ‘You didn’t follow this particular outline.’
  5. Start with positive feedback: Positive feedback increases student engagement. Then you can ask some questions and offer suggestions for improvements.
  6. Give feedback as soon as possible: In any case, try to give the feedback before the student or pupil starts the follow-up assignment so that they can apply the feedback here.
  7. Avoid feedback overload: Too much feedback can be overwhelming. Focus on the essential points to avoid losing the most important messages.
  8. Focus feedback on pre-specified development points: Encourage students or learners to indicate their development points. For example, when submitting their assignment, they can indicate in the text what they feel uncertain about and would like to receive feedback on. Give targeted feedback on these specific areas to support their learning.
  9. Encourage interaction: Ask students to respond to the feedback received. This promotes understanding and engagement, and provides an opportunity to clarify any questions.
  10. Make it an ongoing process: The more feedback a student receives over a period of time, the more opportunities there are to learn and improve. Think of feedback as an ongoing dialogue to encourage progress.

Hopefully, these tips will help you give more effective and constructive feedback. However, if you feel overwhelmed by the thought of implementing these tips in all your assignments, we have two handy solutions for you. In the Revisely comment database, you can save all your feedback and add it to future assignments in just one click. Another option is to outsource your correction work to professional proofreaders through TheyCorrect! For more information, take a look at revise.ly or theycorrect.com.

Good luck!

Start the new school year well!

31 August 2022

The new school year is about to start! To get off to a good start, we have been working hard this summer to further improve Revisely with new features! We are happy to inform you about this and to let you know more about the new correction platform that we are developing, which makes it possible to outsource your correction work to a professional so that you can save time!

First, a brief overview of all the improvements:

  • Ratings
    It is now possible for students to rate the feedback that was given on their assignment by the teacher, peer grader or external corrector. Rating is optional. Would you like to make use of this? Please let us know!
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  • Possibility to personalise Revisely on an organisation-specific basis
    It is now possible to have a personalised view of Revisely. Depending on whether you teach at a secondary school or university, you will only see the appropriate terms for this, such as ‘pupils’ or ‘students’, ‘workgroups’ or ‘classes’. Is this not visible yet? Let us know and we will take care of it for you!
  • Push notifications
    Important notifications such as when you can start correcting an assignment can now be shown as push notifications within Revisely. If you prefer not to receive notifications, you can simply decline this option.
  • Timeline
    The progress of the assignment is now clearly displayed in a timeline. Here you can see the percentage of assignments handed in by students and how many of them you have already marked. This gives you a clear overview of the progress.

  • The Peer grading option within Revisely has been further improved. This includes the ability to do multi-stage peer grading, easier editing of peers and the ability to assign peer graders after the students have submitted their assignments to the teacher.
  • We accidentally counted documents in draft version as submitted when typed directly into Revisely. This problem is now solved.
  • We have expanded the languages in which Revisely is available to include Italian, French, German and Ukrainian.

    TheyCorrect: the correction platform

    You can outsource your correction work via Revisely and we are going to make that increasingly easier. For all assignments you have created via Revisely, you can use the TheyCorrect button to have them corrected by an external professional. This reduces the teacher’s workload, combats the teacher shortage, ensures that students can learn online and that they receive more qualitative feedback.

    We are currently in the pilot phase. Would you like to be put on the waiting list for professionals to correct your assignments? Sign up here!

    I would like to use TheyCorrect!

    Or first look for more information on the TheyCorrect website

Bett.Revisely

Revisely will be at the Bett 2022

22 February 2022

The team of Revisely goes to the Bett 2022! Are you a teacher and/or interested in technology in education? Let’s meet!

The Bett (British Educational Training and Technology Show) is Europe’s largest educational trade fair and focuses on technology in education. Every year, around 35,000 visitors from 113 different countries come to see which trends and developments will have an impact on education. Revisely will also be present at this important international platform with our online correction tool.

Revisely will be together with Dutch Edtech at a stand of the Dutch Embassy (NK60) at the Bett 2022. Dutch Edtech is a collective of innovative Dutch edtech startups with a big ambition:

Showing the world what the Netherlands can offer in terms of tech innovation in education!

Are you also planning to go to the Bett 2022 in London? Great! We would love to meet you during these fun and educational days. Feel free to drop by our stand of the Dutch Embassy (NK60) or plan a meeting with us! Schedule your meeting here or send us an email via info@revise.ly!

 

 

Revisely presented at the Digital Universities Week

26 May 2021

On May 20th, our CEO and founder of Revisely, Jeroen Fransen, gave a presentation on the Times Higher Education’s (THE) first-ever Digital Universities Week organised by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Times Higher Education. During the event, EdStart’s most innovative companies demonstrated solutions for online learning, analytics, and campus management.

THE’s first-ever Digital Universities Week brought together higher education institutions from across the UK to exchange knowledge and discuss best practice regarding their rapid and ongoing digital transformation journeys. The event showcased pioneering voices in the edtech sector.

What is AWS EdStart?
AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator, is designed to help entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud. The accelerator is designed to enable EdTech startups to move faster through benefits such as equity-free financial support, technical training and support, access to a global community of EdTech experts, and more.

Curious what new projects are that we at Revisely are working on? Click here to watch back the event and learn more!

 

Atlantis Group Revisely

Edtech policy is failing globally and needs a ‘critical update’, finds new report by Varkey Foundation’s Atlantis Group

11 November 2019

A new report published today by the Varkey Foundation’s Atlantis Group of 26 former education ministers and heads of government, has found that Edtech is failing to fulfil its promise in classrooms throughout the world and that policy governing its use needs a critical update. Former minister of education in The Netherlands and co-founder of Revisely, Jo Ritzen, is part of the Varkey Foundation’s Atlantis Group. He agrees edtech has great promise but struggles to deliver, often due to political rather than technological reasons.

The Atlantis Group’s report, which was produced following extensive discussions with leading Edtech company CEOs, teachers and academics outlines a range of shortcomings, not least technology’s failure so far to demonstrably improve learning. The report, System failure: Why Edtech policy needs a critical update, found that whilst technology should be working to save teachers time, when tech fails to work properly it can have the opposite effect.

Other problems highlighted in the report include a lack of independent evidence making it hard to know which technology, applications, and systems are effective and which are not. Developers face heavily localized procurement making it difficult to scale-up successful tech. Teachers, often enthusiastic about tech, are let down by inadequate systems or their own lack of training.

The report calls on governments to take action across four key areas:

  • Prioritize evidence-gathering about Edtech, setting up testbed schools and keeping updated about initiatives across the world.
  • Support teachers by listening to their needs and training them adequately to use learning tech.
  • Make sure the right products reach the market by publishing clear purchasing guidelines.
  • Make learning technologies part of the wider education strategy by setting up a cross-sector Edtech task force.

Vikas Pota, Chairman of the Varkey Foundation said:

“The great tragedy right now is that learning technologies are still an afterthought. Today, just a handful of the world’s governments have anything resembling a working Edtech policy. Examples of best-practice are few and far between. The political narrative about technology in education is worryingly similar to that of 50 years ago. Real change, we are told, is always just 10 years away. Our world does not have another 10 years to get it right.

“It’s no secret that education policymaking struggles to keep up with the pace of technology. But it shouldn’t stand still. Around the world, major industries and business have spent decades preparing for a future that they know will be dominated by tech. Ministers of education desperately need to start doing the same. The answer won’t be found just by putting more computers in classrooms but by addressing the political blockages that too often prevent Edtech from succeeding.”

The Atlantis Group was launched at the Global Education & Skills Forum (GESF) 2017 by global education charity the Varkey Foundation. Revisely took part in the Forum and was in the finals to win the Next Billion EdTech Prize 2018.

New release of Revisely is now online!

5 November 2019

At Revisely, we love feedback. Not only the feedback you give to students, but also the feedback that is aimed at us to further improve the application. We did several bug fixes and added improvements to increase the user experience further. The application has the following improvements:

  • Added option for teacher admin role to list information by groups
    Some teachers can be given an extra admin role where it is possible to view the groups and assignments of other teachers. With the ‘only my groups’ option it is now possible to easily limit the information to only your own groups/classes.
  • Status team assignment is now synchronised with all team-members.
    When one of the members of a team hands in a text, the status for all students in the team is then set as ‘Being processed’. Once the document has been processed, the status is changed accordingly for all team members.
  • Functionality to make free annotations at the document that was handed-in
    Previously, it was only possible to give feedback by selecting bits of text. Now it is possible to create a ‘free’ annotation in the document. This means that you do not necessarily need to select a bit of text to link a comment to, but that you can do this anywhere in the document. Apply a long mouse click (longer than normal) in the spot where you would like to make a comment. A menu is then displayed showing you the option to add the usual positive, critical or open comment. Use this to add comments to a graphic, photo or open space! 
  • Default option to let texts be handed-in as a PDF.
    When a new assignment is created, the default option is set to handing in the assignment by uploading a document (Word/PDF etc.) for the students. The default option used to be ‘typing or pasting in the text in Revisely’.
  • Added the possibility to allow late hand-ins for peer grading and team hand-in assignments
    Previously, if an assignment had the peer grading and/or team hand-in option activated, you couldn’t activate the option for hand-ins after the deadline. Now you can!
  • Alert mail send to team-members
    An alert mail is sent to all members of a team if there was an error in uploading the text to Revisely so they can all take steps to remedy.
  • Extra filters
    We added filters in the assignments list, groups list, students list and teachers list so you can more easily narrow down your search.
  • Warning message is shown when mail is not send.
    Only for users with access to the beta or test environment, we now indicate clearly that mails are not actually sent to users.
  • Send an email when the GPRD data is ready to download
    When you request a download of your privacy-related data from Revisely, you receive an email when the download is ready so you don’t have to wait.
  • Added a better download from report files
    When downloading reports concerning assignments, very large assignments caused problems. We fixed this so also these reports can be downloaded without problems.
  • Bugfix when specifying evaluation criteria when creating a new assignment

Get creative with writing skills!

4 January 2019

As soon as students start high school, they write less and less creative texts such as poems, lyrics or short stories. In addition to conventional writing skills, creative writing assignments are very useful for the development of the student.

Students often write texts such as literary analyzes, papers and essays. The effect is that writing in other genres than non-fiction is not encouraged and that these skills are not developed. The reason that creative writing is often not applied in schools is largely based on the assumption that creative writing does not teach students enough (critical) skills. This is not the case. Stimulating creativity can improve writing skills as well as creative thinking and more.

Imagination
Creative writing requires an active brain since students are, for example, writing from different viewpoints to encourage them to view problems from different perspectives. Moreover, creative writing also helps to structure thoughts, express and describe emotions, and to be inspired by the world around them. The students learn to let their imagination run free, to be in someone else’s shoes and develop empathy.

Fun with language
By giving students more freedom to write, they can experience what it is like to have more of a saying in the way they organize and write their assignment. They can have more fun in writing texts and gain confidence in writing skills. Moreover, also for teachers it is often more fun to read and correct a variety of types of texts.

Many more possibilities
There are many possibilities for creative writing. Texts such as fairy tales, poems, diary texts or lyrics can be used for an assignment but also of non-textual sources can be used for inspiration such as music, videos or photographs. Hereby, two courses or subjects can also be combined in an assignment such as English with history or biology. Finally, an assignment can also be made in teams. The possibilities are endless!

In short, by offering more space for creativity in language the brain can be further activated and have a positive effect on the self-confidence of students. There are endless possibilities for creative writing assignments. Think of text forms, sources of inspiration, and combining different subjects with each other for one assignment. Lets get creative!