One of my favorite tools for providing feedback in Google Drive is Kaizena, which allows you to leave voice comments on documents. Today Kaizena launches an enhanced feature: tags. Tags allow you to track and rate skills, saving your comments for future use. Not only does this provide effective feedback for students and a means to track skill development, it’s a real time saver for grading papers.

Here is a summary of what these new features in Kaizena can do:

1. Track and rate skills – tags can be rubric criteria, common core standards, your local state, region, or country’s standards, learning objectives or outcomes…anything.
   1. The first time you type in a tag, we save it for future re-use.
   2. Every tag gets a rating. You can change the tag’s rating levels to match, say, your rubric levels.
   3. After you’ve tagged a highlight, add a voice comment, type a text comment, or add a resource. Or any combination.
2. Save feedback for future use
   1. Remember that voice comment you just made? Save it to the tag, and every time you use that tag in the future, it will reappear. You can even save multiple voice comments or a combination of voice comments, text comments and resources to a tag (psst: tags get really powerful in combination with resources).
3. Skill summary
   1. If you made five “transition” tags with different ratings, then “transition” would appear in the summary as an average of those ratings. This is like a rubric summary, but smarter: students can click on each tag in the summary and see the evidence for the score they received.

Voice comments saved educators time while enabling better student outcomes, and tags continue this legacy:

Better student outcomes

• Knowledge of strengths and weaknesses is a prerequisite for improvement
• Transparency: showing the evidence behind a rubric score builds trust between educators and students

Save time

• Re-use your feedback
• Get rubric criteria out of your head as you read