gotFeedback

We know teachers have a finite amount of time every day. We created gotLearning to allow more engaging and effective collaborations, helping teachers and students capture and communicate about their learning as it is happening.

Knowing that feedback is at the heart of learning, we are ensuring our technology tools support a teacher’s ability to provide timely, effective and personalized feedback. We are proud to introduce gotFeedback, the first classroom teacher’s feedback tool built on OpenAI’s Large Language Model API. 

Introducing gotFeedback, Your New Personal Feedback Resource

gotFeedback is modeled on the research that feedback needs to be:

  • Goal-referenced
  • Tangible and Transparent
  • Actionable
  • User-Friendly
  • Timely
  • Ongoing
  • Consistent

gotFeedback‘s goal is to help teachers provide more individualized feedback to their students in a timely way. After our March 2023 beta period we will be moving our gotFeedback tool into gotLearning‘s Collaborative Learning System to seamlessly integrate this technology into our feedback structure. This will allow teachers to use AI where they deem appropriate, quickly and easily request feedback and actionable next steps for themselves and their students. All of this will be at the individual student level.

Moderated AI Feedback

We are being thoughtful in how we roll out AI in our platform with our first iteration being controlled by the teachers. We believe that the best path at the moment is to have the teacher moderate the AI feedback that is provided. The teacher can use gotFeedback as a resource, choosing which elements are appropriate feedback to share with students. We believe that AI-based feedback has real-world implications in education and that is why we are embedding this technology into our platform.  

While the technology is changing rapidly, we do not believe that today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) are ready to provide feedback directly to students at this time. Many articles illustrate that LLMs can be wildly incorrect and sometimes harmful (see Will ChatGPT Supplant Us as Writers, Thinkers in the Harvard Gazette.)

Join us in trying gotFeedback. We hope you find that it can be helpful in speeding up the feedback process.

Try gotFeedback

Capturing Learning as it Happens

This article was originally posted on Teachers Going Gradeless. 

As educators we all know how complex teaching and learning is and the many stages that happen through a typical learning cycle. We also know that at key intervals throughout the year, schools layer in formal recording and reporting structures to capture and communicate about student learning at that time. Portfolios and conferences are popular ways to report about student learning and growth. Those of you who are reading this are likely thinking about or are going gradeless in your reporting. We are going to further explore portfolios and conferences as tools for capturing learning evidence and showing growth over time. 

Portfolios are most often thought of as a collection of learning evidence that demonstrates students’ knowledge, skills, and understanding. And conferences are most often thought about as the parent-teacher-student conversations at the end of a quarter or semester. I believe that curating evidence of learning over time and partnering with the student in conferencing throughout the learning process are integral to creating a dynamic learning environment.

All of a student’s learning does not occur in the direct view of the teacher. There are a myriad of things students do as they are engaging in new learning. Students interpret new ideas, ask clarifying questions, partake in trial and error, create rough drafts, receive feedback, receive scaffolds as necessary, make revisions, engage in more trial, receive more feedback, etc. These kinds of activities continue throughout the learning cycle supporting students along the way. Usually, it is the teacher who wraps up the learning cycle and for students it results in some level of learning mastery and some artifacts that can be added to a portfolio. 

When done well, portfolios are individualized museums of student learning. These are a great way to show learning growth and when possible allow you to compare where the student started and where they ended. One challenge is that the process of curating artifacts to go into a portfolio usually occurs after the evidence has been completed and toward the end of the learning cycle. There are so many important pieces of formative learning data that are missed when the curation happens at the end.

Students and teachers should consider capturing and curating learning evidence throughout the learning cycle and as the learning is occurring. This allows both the teacher and student to use a triangulated assessment approach which includes performance observations, conversations, and physical products as learning evidence (Damien Cooper, Rebooting Assessment). This triangulated assessment approach allows teachers and students to paint a more nuanced picture of the student and their learning over time.

In the back-and-forth interactions between students and teachers that occur every day lies much of this learning evidence. This includes physical evidence, online documents/presentation, emails, texts, conversations, as well as peer and teacher feedback—to name a few. Capturing all of this formative assessment data is staggering in volume and incredibly hard to manage for both teachers and students. The average classroom size (Elementary, Middle, and High School in the U.S.) is around 24 students (NCES 2020). Multiply 24 by the typical teaching load of 5 classes and you have 120 students for whom to capture learning data. Not an easy task.

We know we can’t expect teachers to read and respond to each piece of qualitative learning evidence their students produce. It is just not humanly possible nor sustainable at a high level. We also know this is really important learning evidence. We must work smarter and not harder. If we leverage technology designed to co-create, capture and curate the learning as it is occurring, this daunting task not only becomes possible, but essential. The trick is that both students and teachers need to be involved to ensure the capturing and curation is a collaborative and communicative experience. Neither student nor the teacher should bear sole responsibility for the curation of learning evidence over time. Co-creation of learning is what technology allows us to easily accomplish. 

When teachers and students are capturing learning evidence along the way, they both have a much easier time showing growth. Thus, creating and maintaining portfolio evidence as the learning is happening results in richer, more nuanced representations of learning over time. When students and teachers capture learning as it happens—it is no longer an add-on reporting method after a performance task is completed. 

Educator benefits of capturing and curating learning portfolios throughout the learning process (as the student is learning) are:

  • Easily showing growth over time

  • Seeing trends in student learning across multiple students allowing for timely adjustments

  • Aiding collaboration with the full team of educators (special education, instructional coaches, and school administrators) when they can view the qualitative learning evidence of individual students in a way they could never do so before

  • Capturing learning as it happens allows for more diagnostic formative assessment. From this teachers can better meet the individual needs of each learner. The teacher can determine where students are in the learning and provide the feedback or the scaffolding to help them move forward

Student benefits of capturing and curating learning evidence throughout the learning process (not just at the end) are:

  • Engaging more fully in all parts of their learning 

  • Allowing student ownership of their learning supporting the development of student agency

  • Including reflections of what/how students learned as well as what they did to accomplish their learning

  • Including artifacts of important performance observations and reflections, teacher/peer conversations as well as physical products

Conferences are another very important part of communicating student learning and growth. When conferences are limited to the parent-teacher-student conference at specific points throughout the school year they serve the purpose of reporting. If we consider conversations we have daily with our students as conferencing (often called conferring) we have another rich data source to add to our portfolios. This process of conferring—the one-on-one conversations with each of your students throughout the week—will become one of the most powerful learning opportunities for both you and your students.

I learned firsthand the power of conferring by observing master teachers Carl Anderson, Penny Kittle, and Kelly Gallagher confer one-on-one with my students with incredible efficiency and effectiveness. I watched them masterfully partner with our students in these conferring sessions to understand where they were in their learning, to celebrate growth and to set goals for their next steps. And, the best part of this kind of conferring is that the students become the owners of their goals and next steps. 

The qualitative data that is generated daily by students is the most powerful learning evidence to tell the story of learning over time. Expanding how we are developing our portfolios and how we conference with students to more deliberately include this important qualitative evidence will strengthen the stories we ask our students to curate about their learning journey. 

Mike Rutherford is the founder and CEO of gotLearning. He lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He has been a teacher, instructional technology coach, school district EdTech director, founder of the K12 group at Blackboard, Vice President of Business Development at Just ASK Publications & Professional Development, all before returning to the classroom as a 6th grade humanities teacher at International School Bangkok in Thailand where he built version 1 of gotLearning in his classroom. You can follow Mike and gotLearning at @mikerford and @growthovertime on Twitter.

Permission is granted for reprinting and distribution of this blog post for non-commercial use only. Please include the following citation on all copies:
Rutherford, Mike. “Capturing Learning as it Happens.” Teachers Going Gradeless. Reproduced with permission of Teachers Going Gradeless. All rights reserved. Available at https://www.teachersgoinggradeless.com/blog/capturing-learning

November 2022 Update

  • Family View is Now Available
  • Google Classroom and Google EduSuite Enhancements

Family View

Now all stakeholders in a student’s life can participate/view their learning as it is happening. Students and teachers can invite multiple family members to view conversations and assignments that have been selected to be viewed by family members.

Google Classroom and Google for Education Enhancements

Thanks to the feedback from many teachers using gotLearning, we have made the sharing of Google Docs, Sheets and Slides much easier.

Importing Google Classroom classes and rosters now allows for classes over 50 students.

October 2022 Update

  • Assignments have been updated
  • Google Drive integration has been streamlined
  • ProTeachers can add a school administrator to their classrooms
  • Professional Conversations are now available to ProTeachers when they add an administrator

gotLearning Assignment Updates

The first major update in assignments is the ability to add students to existing assignments. If you have a student add to the class or if you use one assignment over a long period of time, you can now easily add a student after it was created.

The second major update to assignments is the ability to “Close” an assignment. This feature allows for a teacher to no longer allow additions to the assignment. This was requested by teachers who are using “Turn In” the assignment not as an end point, but a check point and as a request for feedback.

ProTeachers Can Add Administrators to their Classrooms

ProTeachers (the free version of gotLearning) can add their school administrator to their classrooms for free! Now teachers can share the incredible learning conversations (with growth producing feedback) they are having with their students. The administrator can even participate in your classes!

Just a quick FYI – soon you will be able to add two other teachers to your team for free (with your administrator). You will be able to share students, see what students are learning in the other teachers classes and participate in Professional Conversations.

Professional Conversations Available When Adding an Administrator

ProTeachers (free version of gotLearning), when adding an administrator to their classes, open up Professional Conversations. These are gotLearning Learning Conversations but only available to teachers and administrators that have been invited into that conversation.

 

September 2022 Update

School has started and we are thrilled to have so many teachers and students communicating about learning with gotLearning!

We have received incredible feedback and love hearing stories of how you are able to get to know your students and how they learn.

We have updated assignments to make it easier for student’s to turn in. We have made the ability to invite administrators into your classrooms much easier (adding co-teachers is next!) We have also made many refinements to the interoperability with Google Classroom/Docs/Slides/Sheets. Professional Teachers can now manage their school years in settings. 

We have also added Professional Conversations when you add your administrator to your classes!

Family View is Coming

Thank you to the teachers that joined our Family View Round Table. We are working on having family members be able to view their child’s learning conversations and assignments in November. 

August 2022 Update

School is right around the corner (and already started for many of you!) gotLearning wrapped up our summer professional development series – thanks to all the presenters and teachers who attended. This month we conducted our teacher roundtable on notifications and received a ton of great advice and feedback! We have heard you loud and clear. Thank you!

The product has added a new student view, updated the school year functionality so Teams and District licenses can see student’s previous years, labels are now searchable and clickable, and we made some more improvements to assignments.

New Student View

Professional Teachers can now see all of their students in one place. You may also create, edit and delete student’s information on this screen. 

 

July 2022 Update

Providing feedback just got easier! We heard you! Educators and students can now quickly provide feedback through emojis (😀 👍 🎉 🎯 ✅ ) on messages in conversations and assignments.

gotLearning has added a fourth way for schools and teachers to upload their rosters. You can can now use .CSV files to upload students.

Another highly requested feature is the ability to filter and sort unread, read, in progress, turned in, in revision and completed assignments. 

We design by the rule of "Getting to 1". We are striving for teachers and students to be able to get to what they want in as close to one click as possible.

Reactions

Educators and students can now quickly provide feedback inside of conversations using emojis! We have built a skin tone picker for certain emojis. We are releasing this feature’s code and making it open source so other developers can easily allow for users to choose their desired skin tone. 

 

Organizing Student’s Assignments

Time is of huge importance in our classrooms. At gotLearning we have implemented the rule of “Getting to 1”. We are striving for teachers and students to be able to get to what they want in as close to one click as possible. So, we have made some updates to assignment summaries. 

In the Teacher Assignment Class Summary View all progress categories (Unread, read, in progress etc.) are clickable and will bring up each group’s assignments on one screen. You can then see the detailed view or the summary views – all within one click!

The teacher can view a summary of assignments at the student level or open the detailed view to see each learning conversation. This view can also be filtered by selecting the assignment, class or student from the filter bar.

Teacher Assignment All Students View:

Uploading Rosters via CSV Files

gotLearning has now added a fourth way for teachers and schools to upload their students to classes. You can now use a CSV file to import your rosters!

June 2022 Update

We are incredibly excited to introduce labels to gotLearning! One of the main reasons I created gotLearning in my classroom was to better capture and organize student learning data and labels give students and teachers the ability to do that. Before gotLearning, it sometimes felt like I spent more time searching for learning evidence than I did providing feedback. I needed a platform so that students and I could get to what we needed as quickly as possible.

Labelling in gotLearning allows teachers and students to organize learning evidence according to the structures most important to them.

Labels

In gotLearning you can now attach labels to conversations or assignments making it easier for you to organize learning evidence according to the structures that are most important to you (e.g. learning goals, reflections, key evidence, strategic school pillars, etc). Once labelled you can see, at a glance, where a piece of learning evidence fits into the organizational structures you use. You can also search and sort by label as well. Want to see all the assignments and conversations associated with a specific learning goal for a particular student? gotLearning labels make finding that learning evidence easy and efficient!

Both teachers and students can add labels to their conversations. You can easily search by using the search bar or just clicking on an existing label. You also have the ability to filter qualitative learning data by class, student and label.

Assignment Summaries

We’ve also improved our assignments interface. Teachers and students both have informative assignment summary pages. Teachers can see where their class, or each of their students, are in regard to assignment progress. 

Teacher Assignment Class Summary View:

The teacher can view a summary of assignments at the student level or open the detailed view to see each learning conversation. This view can also be filtered by selecting the assignment, class or student from the filter bar.

Teacher Assignment All Students View:

Linking to gotLearning Assignments from other Platforms

Teachers can now easily copy a gotLearning assignment link in an external platform such as Canvas, Google Classroom or Schoology.

Below is a short demo of how easy it is to link to a gotLearning assignment from Google Classroom.

gotLearning Summer Series

Learn how gotLearning helps make a teacher more efficient and effective by joining one of our workshops, drop by office hours, create a cohort or sign up for a roundtable.

gotLearning – 2021 in Review

2021 was a huge year for gotLearning. Taking the concept of a Collaborative Learning System from a 6th grade humanities classroom to a fully fledged platform available to all students, teachers and classrooms around the world has been a massive undertaking.

This would not have been possible without all of the feedback we have received from teachers, students, school administrators and parents from around the world. Thank you to each and everyone of you.

We are incredibly excited to continue our mission into 2022, but we would like to take a look back at what we all have accomplished in the past year.

gotLearning's Collaborative Learning System fills the instructional gap between the Learning Management System (LMS) the Student Information System (SIS).

Some of the highlights include:

  • The defining and creation of a new EdTech category – the Collaborative Learning System (CLS).
  • Partnering with our first customers.
  • gotLearning’s beta version was built by students. We then hired our own internal software engineering team to build on their work and take the software to general availability.
  • gotLearning is now available via all web browsers and devices including Mac, Chromebook, Windows, iPad, Android tablets and mobile devices.
  • gotLearning’s mobile apps allow students and teachers to do everything they can on the web app on their phones. An added bonus is the ability to scan in non-digital work via the mobile app into Learning Conversations.
  • Mobile apps are available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
  • Three editions are now available:
    • ProTeacher for individual educators to use in their own classrooms – free for SY 2021-2022.
    • Teams for up to five educators (teachers, educational specialists and school administrators) to collaborate about and across their classes and students.
    • School Edition for schools that want to be able to curate and share learning evidence involving all of their students and stakeholders (teachers, special educators, instructional coaches, counselors, school administrators etc.)
  • Improvements to learning conversations via feedback from students, teachers and administrators.
    • Integration with Google Classroom and Google Workspace for Education.
    • Improved linking to outside resources such as LMS and SIS platforms and your favorite EdTech tools such as FlipGrid and Kahn Academy etc.

We are incredibly excited to continue to provide an elegant new platform to curate and share learning evidence. Whether in-person, hybrid or remote, educators and students can show growth over time.

We are looking forward to helping students, teachers and schools personalize learning, build student agency, implement competency-based learning, standards-based grading (or even ungrading), teaching soft-skills and creating student centered classrooms.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from gotLearning!

If you want to learn more do not hesitate to contact us.

2,295 Sources of Qualitative Learning Data

I was astonished. 2,295 was the total. It was 2016 and I had just calculated the total number of qualitative learning data sources that I had to manage as a classroom teacher. I consider myself fairly technical and organized but it took me so long to find things which I now realized was because I was drowning in data. 

Now, to be clear, the data that I am talking about was not my students test scores or grades. My school’s student information system took care of that data. The data I am talking about is the important, daily learning generated by my students and included the following:

Handwritten rough drafts Notes from informal conversations with students Teacher and Peer Feedback
Student self reflections Informal checks for understaning Google Docs/Microsoft Word files
FlipGrid videos Student created podcasts Presentations (videos also the slide decks) including Pear Deck
Parlay discussions/Jamboard Jams Emails Summarizers used at the nef of class about the day's learning
Test Quizzes Homework
Goal setting documents Assessment tools like continuums and roadmaps

The above shows 17 sources of data regularly generated from/for each of my students. I had 135 students. Multiply those two and the total is 2,295 sources. My experience is the daily experience of the classroom teacher; trying to manage all the disparate sources of data that are generated by students throughout the day, week or month. Teachers understand how important these qualitative data sources are as they show the complexity of learning for each of our students and show their growth over time which for some was well beyond the grade level expectations and for others was below.

This rich learning data was individual to each student, helped me understand where students were in the moment, where I needed to take them and it told the story of my students’ learning. As important as that data is for teachers, how are we supposed to capture and manage all it especially when our current systems aren’t designed for this?

I was so troubled by this conundrum but my students just kept generating. They generated work through email, Google Docs/Slides/Sheets and the entire Microsoft Office Suite. They used NoRedInk, Khan Academy, TedTalks, Newsela, Kahoot, YouTube videos and my school’s Learning Management System (LMS).  The students were creating learning evidence on their phones, their laptops, on paper, with art, on the whiteboard, on post it notes, conversing with one another, conversing with me, self reflecting and the list goes on and on. It was wonderful because it showed the students learning in real time but it was overwhelming to manage.

I could not possibly capture and manage all of that learning data, but I thought…what if I had a platform that could capture a lot of it and, most importantly, it was a platform that the students and teachers co-created to communicate about their learning. Instead of using teacher-led platforms like the LMS, what if I could partner with the students to capture this rich learning data, put it in a longitudinal timeline, showing the students different iterations of their learning and growth and make it easily searchable like Google? What if I created a platform where students were at the center and helped manage their learning and growth?

So I set out a pretty wide search. The LMS was completely teacher-led and focused on the entire class – not individual students. However, the LMS does a great job of providing content and organizing assignments. I was looking for something that helped after the the initial learning activity occurred.  I couldn’t find anything designed with the students at the center and as co-creators. So, to make a long story short. I built one using business tools while teaching 6th grade English Language Arts and Social Studies. I refined it over a few years. I eventually left the classroom, ditched the business tools and built gotLearning version 2 from scratch – both a web version and mobile apps. With students as partners in capturing and communicating about their learning I now can manage all 2,295 sources of qualitative data to more robustly tell the story of their learning – and so can you. 

 

If you want to learn more do not hesitate to visit our main webpage or contact us.