Here at TeachPitch we are doing our best to make teacher self-improvement as easy as possible. But what to do, if you are not sure what exactly to improve? We’ve all been there – everything seems to be going OK, but you are still convinced that improvement is possible. Perhaps it is time to turn to student feedback with Edurio Solo.
Student feedback has become a problematic buzzword in schools. Everybody lauds its theoretical value, but when it comes to applications, enthusiasm quickly evaporates.
“Student surveys are a popularity contest,” we hear in conversations on feedback. “They are too time-consuming to be worth doing.”
Fortunately, student feedback does not have to be this way. We spoke with Edurio, a startup that developed Edurio Solo – a free tool for teachers to collect instant student feedback. They have focused on three main principles that make surveying quick, easy, and actually useful. According to Edurio, all that is needed is better questions, a handy way to collect the answers, and a simple way to analyse the results.
1. Better questions
Your students are the only people who participate in all of your lessons, apart from yourself. Unfortunately, they are not experts in education, so asking them “How well do you like the lessons?” is unlikely to produce valuable insights.
In the Edurio Solo teacher tool, Edurio’s team focuses on what the students know about: their feelings and observations. Guided by decades of education research, they have crafted Edurio’s surveys to ask about topics that matter in a way that works. And, if you have specific goals of your own, they let you add custom questions – after all, you know your own needs best.
2. Better collection
Whenever we see a teacher printing out hundreds of surveys, we think about waste. Waste of paper, waste of printer toner, and the most horrible waste of all – the time spent arranging the completed surveys in neat piles and meticulously entering them in a spreadsheet.
We are very glad to see the time and effort saved with Edurio Solo – you can get from registration with your Facebook, Google or Office 365 account to first survey launched in 2 minutes. The platform allows organising student groups classroom-by-classroom with a few clicks, generating appealing surveys that students can access on any device, and viewing the completion rate at any time.
3. Better results
A teacher’s day often starts at 6am and ends a bit after midnight. Planning lessons, preparing handouts, and marking papers are as energy-consuming as working in the classroom. School leaders should not expect teachers to dig through Excel tables in their free time.
Edurio Solo makes understanding feedback easier by going straight to the results. You can see what your students think, compare groups, and spot areas of improvement in an instant.
You can pick up more tips on student feedback by searching for feedback in the TeachPitch library, and we are glad to see that finally there is a technical platform that makes collection of feedback truly simple. Edurio Solo is already helping thousands of teachers find the best path for their professional development. So – if you want to have a better idea on which TeachPitch resources might bring you the most value or just want to look back at the term, give Edurio Solo a shot over!