Student voice in digital classrooms : the use of digital tools for continuous student feedback collection

For the proposed paper we report on the use of diverse digital tools for continuous student feedback collection and discuss students' perceptions of and preferences for different approaches, with the aim of illustrating the influence of digital technologies on student voice. Five different digital tools have been investigated : TodaysMeet,Wiki,Padlet,Socrative, and WhatsApp. Eighty-eight non-English major freshmen from six randomly grouped classes at a Hong Kong university participated in the study. They were all enrolled in a credit-bearing course taught by one of the authors. After finishing all lectures of the course, we conducted a questionnaire survey among the participants, asking them what approach to feedback collection they felt most or least effective for communicating their feedback to teachers and classmates, which tool they felt most or least interesting, which tool they felt most or least convenient, and what advantages and disadvantages the five different digital tools have respectively. We also interviewed twenty participants to obtain further explanations of their answers to the questionnaires. The results showed that generally Padlet was regarded as the most liked and Wiki the least liked tool by the participants. Students highly valued features like effectiveness and interestingness, and considered convenience comparatively less important.