 Hi, I'm Sharon Loresella and my session today is on using a new EdTech tool called MOTE. So I'm going to share my screen with you to explain a little bit more about this wonderful tool. I'm a professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. I'm also a worldwide MOTE ambassador. So today I'm going to introduce you to MOTE and discuss why you could use it and you'll walk away knowing how to use it. It's that easy. Now MOTE is a new EdTech tool that allows you to make voice comments and then send them to your students. It works within the Google Suite and at Ontario Tech the university subscribes to the Google Suite. I really wanted to make use of our subscription to that and give students more of a reason to take advantage of that. So MOTE helps you to record your voice in order to provide feedback to students in a different way rather than just exclusively through written or typed comments. And you can really use MOTE with anything. It works in all of the Google Suite, Google Slides, Docs, it works on PDFs, it works in Gmail, and you can even use it in your personal life if you really want to. So I want to mention why this tool is important to us in higher ed. Feedback to students is absolutely essential. And it's not just enough to click boxes on a rubric. If we want students to learn, we really have to explain how they did something right or how they did something not so right. And research on teaching and learning shows that when we provide students with a grade and with feedback at the same time, they focus almost entirely on the grade. They don't even really look at the feedback. So we have to address this and empower students to learn more deeply and to provide the opportunity to connect with them in different ways. So we can write comments on assignments that's perfectly fine in typing or whatever. But if we capture our voices, it becomes even more powerful. And this is important in online courses, hybrid, face to face, anywhere. And a bonus is that speaking is very often faster for some people than typing. So this is what it looks like when a student gets a MOTE. It's kind of like a little card that tells them that they got a voice note. And it's kind of like mail. It's kind of fun. And this is I took a screenshot to give you an example of what MOTE looks like when a student gets it. So my students submit their work in Google Drive so that I can provide feedback through MOTE. And this is a PDF that a student submitted. And when I provide feedback, I'll very often type some comments. And then toward the end, I'll offer a summative comment through MOTE. And students can listen to it. But a great bonus of MOTE is that we can transcribe our voice notes. And this is really wonderful for accessibility so the student can listen to the voice note but can also read it as well. And you can edit the transcription also because we know that technology isn't always perfect. So this is another example of a PDF where I made a voice note for a student. And this student just loved it. You can see here that they probably she said that she listened to the voice note multiple times. So this really gave me and my students a really unique opportunity to connect using this technology. It just comes off as more sincere. And one of my students said that when they read written comments from faculty, it's very often in a mean voice, but then when they can hear the comments, they realize the sincerity and the thoughtfulness that comes with these. So you're going to want to know how to do this. So when you open the internet, make sure that you use Chrome to do this. Use Chrome as your browser. And then go to JustMote.me and install Moat on your Chrome browser. Takes less than 30 seconds. It'll just download into your extensions on your Chrome browser. And then go into any document in your Google Drive. Could be a document, slides, sheets, a PDF, anything, even email. Highlight something that you can see here in the first box. So open a comment. So highlight something and then create a comment. And then tap the little note button that's in the corner here that I've circled. You tap that and then record your note. Just talk. And then when you're done, you press Done and then press on comment. And your comment is inserted into the document that you opened and wanted to make a comment in. So you can capture your voice anywhere on the internet to use the Moat extension. And you can do this even by using your browser. You can just open your browser. You can open even to a web page. Click on Moat, record something and then capture it and then insert it somewhere else. A great feature of Moat is the Moat pad. So let's say you've got, I don't know, 60 students and you wanted to provide verbal feedback to them. But a lot of students made a similar mistake or a lot of students did something really wonderfully that was common amongst them all. So you can record a Moat to the Moat pad that says, oh, this was a great job on whatever section. And then you can recycle that and use it over and over. So you don't have to record something new for every single document that you create. You can create a recording, put it to your Moat pad and then copy and paste it into a variety of documents so that you're not having to record the same thing over and over. It's kind of like a recycling feature that Moat has as well. So it's very helpful if you have large classes and you can record those Moats and then insert them in common situations. So if you want to transcribe, which is a wonderful tool, you finish the recording, you add the comment and then you click on edit to transcribe the text. So this is what I did here. I recorded myself saying this is a Moat. I'll show you how to transcribe. And then you just click on edit and then you can transcribe your comments. Now I had to edit this one a little bit because the voice comments made this say this is Emote. So I just edited that and then put it in. So you can change your punctuation, you can take out certain things to make the written comments more streamlined. But the key here is that you can transcribe the voice for accessibility purposes, which is very helpful. And then add the transcription, edit it and then paste it right in there. So I'm at Ontario Tech University. Please feel free to contact me. I'm on Twitter at academic bad girl and I would love to help anyone with their Moat experiences. So please be in touch.