Using iAnnontate on the iPad to provide individual formative feedback

As part of a Foundation Degree Course in the School of Science I've presented a lecture on Technologies for Learning. This session included the option for students to submit a short reflective formative assignment around the effective use of a web 2.0 technology to enhance their learning.

The work flow is the student work is submitted to Blackboard. I download and upload them to my dropbox.com. I access the file in Dropbox.com on my iPad and open in iAnnotate PDF. After which I upload the annotated script back to Dropbox.com, to be uploaded to the Gradebook in my Wolsey course.

After opening I annotate the document. For my first pilot I have used just the comment tool. This is where I click on the comment box, click on the assignment and type in my comments.

I must say, this all worked very well, and I managed to complete the process from a cafe ... not a desktop computer or bulky laptop in site. Adding typed comments was very straightforward. The only problem I had was hooking back into the UCS network to upload the annotated scripts. The final stage of mapping the feedback to the person will be completed on a desktop back in the office.

The outcome annotation is illustrated below



 

This option displays the comments in line with the text.

Overall, the process can be simplified with the use of the Course Admin to achieve economies of scale. The next stage will be to look at different feedback options, ie., free text, and audio.