When students read feedback on their written work, it can sometimes be hard for them to understand the tone of your comments. This is particularly true when the feedback is critical and the student is fairly sensitive. That’s when hearing your voice can be helpful. A voice comment from you can help them understand the tone of the feedback you have provided.
Kaizena is a free tool that you can use to add audio comments to your students’ written work. To add voice comments to Word documents and to PDFs. To do this you need to create a free account on the Kaizena website and use the Kaizena web app to create a “group” or list of students or other collaborators. Once you have done that you can create a conversation based around an uploaded Word document or PDF. In the following video I demonstrate how to add voice comments to a PDF.
For Google Docs users Kaizena has a free Google Docs Add-on that makes it easy to add voice comments to your documents and to the documents that students share with you. That Add-on is demonstrated in my video that is included below.