Using Tech to Encourage Peer Feedback During Presentations

In a world dominated by digital communication, we need to help students build real-world speaking and listening skills. While speeches and presentations—formal or informal, in person, on Zoom, or via video—are great ways to practice and hone those vital speaking skills, cultivating listening abilities has proven (at least for me) more difficult.

Frustrated that presentation/speech week was turning into 8 minutes of summative assessment drowning in a sea of apathy, I started to look for better ways to facilitate feedback and grow listening skills. Peer feedback, group feedback, forms, discussion, all either created a lot of paperwork for me to sift through or fostered trite feedback without deepening anyone’s speaking or listening skills.

So, I looked for a simple tech tool that would revolutionize how I did speeches and presentations in my classroom. I found one in Socrative.

Good tech tools do one or more of the following: 

The best tech tools do all of the above and adapt to multiple purposes. Socrative checks all of the boxes. This simple quiz tool transformed how I did speeches and presentations in my classroom, turning a week of zoned-out audience members into a week of engaging simultaneous formative and summative assessments. 

I first used Socrative as a traditional quiz tool. It’s free, and content is accessible via the app as well as the website, making it easy to use anywhere. Educators can search for existing content, create their own, and share with colleagues, all of which helps save precious prep time. 

For speeches and presentations, I made a simple quiz for peer feedback and turned a week of summative assessments for one student at a time into a week of ongoing formative assessments and increased feedback for everyone. 

If students rated a speaker a five for a certain criterion but I gave that same speaker a two, we discussed it as a class, noting how the speaker (and future speakers) could improve. (Note: I always give speakers who agree to go on the first day “benefit of the doubt” points, as they don’t have the chance to learn from other speakers.) Even better, instead of feedback from just me, speakers now received feedback from 25+ people. 

What It Looks Like in the Classroom

And it was a success. While I didn’t use this presentation quiz for every speech we did, because I used it for our first major presentation and then occasionally after that, students were far more engaged during presentations. 

If you have Socrative, here’s my quiz code: SOC-68520018. You can import it into your quizzes, modify it, and use it as it works for you. If you have a quiz tool that you already use, build your own quiz and turn presentation week into an interactive, ongoing formative assessment.