Kaizena

Kaizena aims to improve the speed and quality of teacher feedback on students work through verbal and embedded video comments.

Overview

Kaizena believes in the power of audio feedback. It allows teachers to provide audio-recorded feedback to student’s writing assignments. By doing so, it aims to help teachers deliver more personal and a higher amount of feedback in less time. As of August 2015, Kaizena is free for teachers and students.

APPROACH

Teachers and students sign into Kaizena using a Google sign in. Teachers begin by choosing the relevant subject and grade level. Kaizena allows teachers to create groups of students and to organize those groups by class or other criterias. Kaizena provides a profile link that teachers share with students, so they can join the relevant group. Using that link, students can join the group and then share Google documents such as homework assignments back with the teacher.

When teachers receive those documents, they can add verbal or written comments on the work. Kaizena also provides a set of prerecorded video and text lessons, relevant to the subject and grade level, that teachers can link to the students' work. Kaizena hires teachers to create some of these lessons and also incorporates lesson snippets from other sites, such as LearnZillion. 

Students can, in turn, share responses back with teachers by adding either verbal or written comments on the feedback that they've received. 

IMPLEMENTATION

As of October 2015, Kaizena only supports Google Docs, which requires a modern browser, but plans to expand support to Microsoft Office in the future.