Learning To More Fully Integrate GoReact in the Classroom

JD Schramm:

Let me tell you a little bit about my journey in GoReact. I think the first time I saw GoReact was 2012. I was at the Management Communication Association Conference. It’s a small conference of people who teach communication at business schools. And I saw it and the light bulb went off. I was like, oh my gosh, that would be remarkable to get to watch a video, type feedback, and have that be easy and immediate for the students to be able to see. And so I dabbled with GoReact, but I really didn’t dive into GoReact for another four or five years.

From 2012 to 2017, I used it in exec ed programs, but I didn’t use it in any classes that carried credit. And part of my thinking in doing that was that it wasn’t yet integrated with Canvas, which was the learning management system that we used. And I wanted to make sure some of the bugs were worked out, some of the kinks were worked out before I used it with students in classes that were carrying tuition and credit with them. I wished I wouldn’t have waited so long once I started using it more fully. So I kind of stepped up each year how I used GoReact. In 2017, I just used it for the midterm, and then shortly after that I used it for the midterm and the final.

In 2019, I had one year that I had a dual appointment at both Columbia and at Stanford. And at Columbia I was teaching strategic communication students. And that was the first time I used the function of GoReact allowing students to give one another feedback. And so I added not just me using it to get my feedback out to students, but I added it for student to student feedback. And then at Stanford I taught my final class. It was fascinating. The final class that I taught at Stanford was March 10th of 2020. Now let that sink in for you a little bit. My final class was actually right as COVID reared its head throughout the globe.

And it was a Monday Friday class. So Monday and Friday of one week, all of my students did their final presentations. Over that weekend I did all the grading in GoReact. And on Monday, which would’ve been the very final day of class, we went into lockdown, and all the teachers were scrambling to teach online. What is Zoom? How do I mute? I went into my final class, opened up Zoom, put students into breakout rooms, and had them together watch their video that they had just done the week before and see my feedback and my grading and my evaluation. The fact that I had already been using GoReact and the students were already familiar with it made my final class activity and my use of Zoom very effective. And I was able to just easily step into that being the way that they saw their feedback and the way that they experienced their final class.

So then after that point in time, I launched myself as an independent communication coach and consultant. I’m now fully self-employed, and I still accepted a faculty appointment at UC Davis, which is the video I’m going to show you in a few minutes, teaching their accounting students. One day a week I drove up from San Francisco to Davis and taught accounting students. And it was there that I started using GoReact for them to do their self-evaluations. And so I was able to literally, like the concept of mastery, iteratively keep adding and adding the functionality of GoReact that I wanted to use with my students.

And so I went from just using it with non-credit offerings, exec ed offerings, to using it for me to give feedback, for them to give feedback to one another. I don’t do that live, I don’t do the simulcast while the students are speaking, that there’s students typing, but I do let them give one another feedback after the fact, to them using it for their own self-review to where in my final class at UC Davis, it was fully integrated as just a tool that was necessary to be effective in the classroom.