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Using Floop for Remote Learning

With Floop started by two teachers in Seattle, you can bet we’re feeling the impacts of coronavirus. Even though our schools are still open, over half of our students are absent out of precautionary measures. Remote learning is now a requirement for us to reach all students, in class and at home.

Teachers can use Floop for FREE through the end of the school year, and schools or PLCs with 5+ teachers can sign up for a free 30 min PD. Here’s how Floop helps teachers give feedback to students learning remotely.


Your Existing Assignments, Any Device

Floop was designed to support the way you work and teach, so you use all your existing assignments, paper or digital, on any device. Because students can submit photos of their work, in addition to PDF and Google docs, sheets, and slides, you can facilitate feedback on a variety of assignments. Math tests from home, mixed media paintings, circuits for digital electronics, drafts of essays, science lab notebook entries - all are fair game.


Floop accepts photos, PDFs, and Google docs, slides, and sheets.

Fast Teacher Feedback

With Floop, you can give feedback 4x faster while helping students engage with their feedback. Once students have submitted work, you can add comments, questions, and next steps anywhere on the page. When you see similar student mistakes, you can drag and drop previous comments. The counter helps you know how often a misconception occurred, so you can address it with the whole class. From there, the feedback is sent instantly to your students and you can continue the conversations in Floop.

Just being able to see, review, and converse on student work remotely is powerful enough. If you’re looking to level up your teacher feedback game even more, here are some suggestions:

Real Time Conversations

Let your students know when your office hours are. Maybe, set aside 30 minutes a day to be on Floop giving feedback. That way, your students can be online at the same time and you can have live conversations through the app about their work.

1:1 Student Conferencing

Have students submit reflections onto Floop. Follow up, ask questions, and then require students to respond before they receive a grade. This leads into a conversation very much like a 1:1 student conference.

Student Agency

Let students be the ones to seek feedback. Require that they include a feedback question with their submission, or create an open dropbox where students can submit any assignment that they want feedback on, anytime. In our classrooms, we’ve created an “Office Hours” assignment and promised students a 24 hour turnaround time to provide feedback if they ask.

Test Security

When sending assignments home with students, cheating might be on many teachers’ minds. Test security can be hard to manage when students are at home with devices. With Floop, you have a digital record of all student assignments, so you can tell really easily if students have cheated. I’ve been able to flip back and forth between student work and take screenshots that I can use when following up with those students.

Peer Review

Not only does Floop help you with teacher-student feedback, Floop supports peer review so that your students can interact, even when they’re not in the classroom. The peer review is anonymous for students, so students won’t know who’s work they’re seeing, and they won’t know who gave them feedback. Students keep seeing new work samples and giving feedback until you close the peer review.

The best part about Floop’s peer review is how it’s guided for students. You know when you ask students to trade and check each other’s work, and it quickly devolves into feedback like “It’s good” and “You’re missing a comma”? Usually, getting students to give meaningful feedback in class takes a ton of coaching. Floop coaches students through the process with scaffolded questions and sentence starters.

As a teacher, you get a summary of the peer review as it happens. You can see at a glance who’s participating in the review session, what feedback students are receiving, and which students might need more support and teacher feedback. The colors in the peer review monitoring screen correspond to traffic light colors (Green = “I completely agree criteria has been met”, Yellow = “I somewhat agree”, and Red = “I don’t agree yet”).


Here’s a couple ways that you can run your peer review remotely.

Live Peer Review

If your class usually meets at a certain time, see if you can get your whole class involved at the same time! Make sure your students have submitted their work in advance (maybe the night before). Then, set the time where the peer review starts. Give students 25 minutes to complete 5 peer reviews. When you close the peer review, students will be able to see their feedback right away.

Open Peer Review

If it’s challenging to get your students online at the same time, you can keep peer review open for a period of time. Have students submit their work in advance. The next day, open peer review, and require that students complete a certain number of peer reviews on Floop as their assignment for the day. After leaving peer review open for 12-24 hours, you can close the peer review. Then, students will be able to see their peer feedback.

Revisions

Of course, the learning isn’t complete until students act on their feedback. With Floop, students can see their teacher and peer feedback in one place, and then revise their work based on feedback. When they resubmit their work to the same assignment, it gets saved as a new version. That way, you can see how they used feedback to learn.
Floop allows students to submit multiple versions of their work.

So, these are a few of the ways you can use Floop to support your remote classroom. It’s a challenging time for teachers and students, but the Floop team is here to help. Please let us know your questions and feedback anytime!

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