Kaizena (derived from "Kai.zen", a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement) is an unusual system designed to provide feedback to students as both written and audible (recorded) comments on their work. They have an excellent website which explains the features and philosophy behind the system here: https://kaizena.com/about - particularly impressive and useful is their page of documented research which led to the development of the system. However, as an on-line teacher, I am working one-to-one most of the time, and feedback is not so much an issue for me as it is in the classroom situation. But I decided to explore Kaizena anyway, and I am SO glad that I did. Both students and teachers can post materials to a "Group" (I think of these as 'courses'). The original intention was, I believe, that this should be student work for critique. And, as such, it works fine. But I have also found that it is very useful to introduce a piece of text, either from our coursebooks or from "real-life" materials for use by students. When a word or passage from that text is highlighted, either by the teacher or the student, a comment box pops up. In this, one can either:
These facilities can be used both in real-time - during the course of the lesson (especially useful for modelling and lexis development) or off-line (more useful for explanations which need research and for marking assignments). While I use the Lessons and Skills for correction and evaluation purposes (and they REALLY save time and effort, as well as ensuring that you provide consistent responses), the written and recorded comments are the bits that I find most useful. In one (real-life) scenario, I have a student studying Ovid's Metamorphoses. Always a tough assignment, but when your student has English as L2, even tougher. We are using the Internet Classics Archive translation by Garth, Dryden et al.(http://classics.mit.edu//Ovid/metam.html) as our primary text, and supplementing this with the prose version by A.S. Kline (www.poetryintranslation.com). As the Garth work appeared originally in 1717AD, the English is very traditional and demands extensive "re-translation" into modern English. And Kline's excellent work is sometimes rather inaccessible for a G6 ESL student. So, there is extensive need for explanation, translation and speech modelling as the student reads through the work. In my on-line class, much of this can be achieved real-time using Skype or Zoom. But Kaizena enables us to make these observations and explanations permanent, in the form of written and spoken comments, which are associated with the highlights in the original text. At this point, maybe I should remember that sometimes "a picture is worth a thousand words": If a student clicks on a comment (left-hand pane) the right-hand pane scrolls to the highlighted text. But if the student clicks on the highlighted text (right-hand pane) the left-hand pane scrolls to the associated comment. Cool? SUPER cool! When either of us highlights text in the right-hand pane, a comment box pops up that can be used for a written or spoken query or answer, or for a "lesson" reference or for a "Skills" rating. Even better than "feedback", this is "dialogue". Comments can either be recorded in a public conversation, which both current and future students can see, or in a private conversation, specific to each student. I do NOT work for Kaizena, but I DO owe them a debt of gratitude for making me a more effective teacher and for reducing the load of "doing it right". For my parents and students, you are always free to ask to enroll in a Kaizena-based course (I have not yet found a course that does NOT benefit from using Kaizena). For other teachers, if I have piqued your interest, I suggest that you check out the site (link is at the beginning of this article) and, if you have questions, chat with the folk at Kaizena - they are friendly, enthusiastic, helpful and very knowledgeable.
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AuthorTony is an experienced on-line English and Science teacher with an extensive background in IT support and training. Archives
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