In this video I'm going to show you how to use the Google Chrome extension
Mote in order to leave voice comments on Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, and
Google Classroom. Mote is an intuitive, easy way to add voice comments to student work,
and if you're a G-Suite user, you definitely want to make sure that you have this extension
installed. My name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech
Classroom. You can get the Mote extension from the Google Chrome web store. So now to get this
extension, I'll click 'Add to Chrome' and then I'll click 'Add Extension.' Once you've added
it, you'll need to set up your account. So here since I'm setting up a teacher account first,
I'll choose that I'm 18 years or older. So I just want to show you the pricing here so that you can
see the differences between the free accounts and paid accounts. First you'll notice that you can get
an account totally for free and that's going to allow you to leave unlimited voice notes on
G-Suite products. With the free account you'll also be able to monitor voice note engagement
and I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. One of the key differences between the free
accounts and the paid accounts is the length of the voice note that you can leave. So with the free
account you're going to be limited to a 30 second audio recording, whereas with the paid accounts
you can record up to 90 seconds. And then some of these more advanced features like voice to text
transcription, translation, as well as the ability to save a recording and use it over and over again
are only going to be available with the paid version. When you first create your free account
it will set you up with a trial period where you'll have access to these premium features
so you can give them a try and see if it's worth it to you to pay for them. Let's hop over to this
Google Doc to see how Mote works. So let's say that a student has turned in work through Google Docs
and you want to leave them a voice comment on their work. First I'll go
up here to 'Insert' and then I'll select 'Comment.' You'll notice now that I have Mote installed
that a little purple 'm' icon shows up inside of the comment box. And to leave a voice comment
all you need to do is click on that purple 'm' and then you can record your audio. Right now I
don't have the transcription tool enabled, so if I wanted to add text transcription
I would have to write that in myself. You can do that by clicking on the purple 'edit'
icon, then you can play back your audio and type out what you just heard yourself say. Although the
auto transcription feature is a nice feature, it's also not that difficult to just type what you just
wrote pretty quickly. A premium feature that you will have access to during the trial period is the
Motebook and this is going to allow you to save your voice notes and reuse them later on other
student work. So let's say that I wanted to be able to access this voice comment over and over again.
What I could do is click 'Save As' and then give this particular voice comment a name. So here
I'll give it a name like 'Too short' and now every time that I wanted to leave this same comment,
I would be able to access that again and I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. And then
another premium feature is the translate tool. So if I click translate here I can choose from
a drop-down menu of different languages and then it will auto-translate what I had just transcribed
into another language. Then when you're ready to post the comment for students to listen to,
just click on the blue 'Comment' button. There you'll see that an audio file will pop up
and you can hit the play button to play it back and listen to what you just recorded. Let's go over
here and look at the student view now and first i'll show you what it will look like if students
don't have Mote installed as an extension on their browsers as well. So here you'll notice
that the student can click on your comment and then click on the link and that link will take
them over to a separate web page where they'd be able to listen to your voice comment. So even if
students don't have Mote installed, this is still a way that they can listen to the comment that
you left them and if you transcribed it, they'll also be able to see that transcription below.
Students can also respond quickly to that comment with an emoji, so if they choose the confused face
that will tell you that they need support with understanding that feedback, whereas if they choose
the diamond, that just means that they understood it and they're good to go. If possible Mote is
going to be more effective if students are able to also install that extension on their browsers. On
most school managed devices, students can't do this themselves so it might be something that
you'd have to have your school admin team push out directly to a student's computer. Now you'll
notice that if the student has Mote installed they can just listen to your audio comment directly
inside of the comment box without having to go over to another web page and you'll also
see that those same emojis are here so that they can communicate back with you whether or not they
understood the feedback or still need help with it. And then in addition to listening to your feedback,
students can also hit reply and then record their own audio response back to you as well. So this
would be useful not only for teacher to student feedback, but also for peer-to-peer collaborative
work so that students could leave each other quick audio comments on a collaborative document
that they were working on together. So bouncing back over here quickly to the teacher document,
you can now see what it looks like after the student has left me a voice comment as well.
Next I'm going to show you how you can see those different emojis to see which students need help
with the feedback and which ones are good to go. So you can go back up here, click on the Mote
extension, and then scroll down to 'My Activity & Engagement.' There you'll see the different voice
notes that you recorded and you'll also be able to see whether or not a student saw that comment,
if they listened to it, and which emoji they left for you. So remember that that diamond emoji just
means that the student understood the feedback and they're ready to move on. In exactly the same
way as Google Docs, Mote will also allow you to leave an audio comment on Google Slides as well.
This time I'll enable the voice transcription tool so that you can see what that looks like.
So I'll go up here to the Mote extension and then turn on 'Enable voice transcription' and then I'll
highlight a part on Google Slides where I want to leave a comment, click on the purple 'm' icon to
record my comment, and then when I'm finished, click on the 'Edit' button again in order to access the
transcription. And here you'll see that rather than having to type the transcription, it's just going
to interpret what I said and auto transcribe it for me. If the auto transcription wasn't entirely
correct, you can also jump in and fix a couple errors if needed. Of all the premium feature tools,
I think the Motebook tool is by far the most useful. To access Motebook, rather than clicking
on the purple icon and then recording your voice, you'll hold down on that icon and there you'll see
that it's going to allow you to choose from any pre-recorded voice comments that you already made.
So here I can select that 'Too short' voice comment that I already saved and that will put that
same exact voice comment in. So you can probably envision how much time you could potentially save
here by pre-recording a bank of comments and then reusing them over and over when giving students
feedback about their work. Really quickly I just want to show you here how Mote also works with
Google Sheets. So just like Google Docs and Google Slides, you can also add a comment in a sheet and
then record your voice here as well. And then the last thing I want to show you is how Mote works
with Google Classroom. So let's say that we're here in the assignment view in Google Classroom and we
want to leave a comment for the entire class about that assignment. Traditionally you would only be
able to type out a comment, but once you have the Mote extension installed, you can also voice record
an audio comment as well. And now let's look at what it would look like if we're giving students
feedback on their work in Google Classroom. I'll go up here to the 'Student Work' tab and then I'll
click on an assignment that a student has turned in. You'll notice in the private comments section
that the Mote icon is here as well, so as part of your grading process in Google Classroom
you could also leave students a voice note. So here would be another place where it would be really
useful to have those pre-recorded voice notes when leaving students feedback on their work. Like I
mentioned in the beginning of the video, if you're a G-Suite user, I highly recommend that you get
the Mote extension. The free version has high level functionality and you'll also have a trial period
to try out some of the premium features to see if it's worth it to you to buy access to it. And if
you have any questions about Mote or suggestions about how to use it, I'd love to hear about those
in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching my video to the end. If you found the tips
that I shared helpful, please share it with other teachers that you know, hit the like button, and
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