I'll be sharing some of my favorite finds from the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning 2014. Today's spotlight is on Kaizena. Kaizena is a way to give feedback on documents. What I love about it is that I can sign in automatically through a Google account. My school has Google accounts for all our school accounts, and I already have students turn in essays through Google Drive. I always make comments on their drafts, so Kaizena will be a great addition to what I'm already doing. Google Drive only allows for text comments, but Kaizena also has options for voice comments and links as well. I am going to try it out for the link comments. If a student has a grammatical or mechanical error that is prevalent throughout their work, I can add a comment with a link to an explanation of the error and how to fix it. With link comments, adding a link to a comment once will save it for future use; every time that comment is made, the same link will automatically be linked to it again. This will be extremely useful as an English teacher, because I often find myself making the same comments time and time again. Kaizena will be a time saver on giving feedback to student papers, and then students can individually check out the link to some sort of tutorial or minilesson on what they need to know to correct their own papers. I don't know how many times I have to explain commas splices and run on sentences each year, so hopefully Kaizena will save me some of the repetition.
I liked reading about your practical use of this tool - I might need to check into it once school starts again and I am supporting upper grade teachers. We have google accounts for students as well.
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