Earlier this year Kaizena released an updated Google Docs Add-on that streamlined the way that you can add voice comments to your students’ Google Documents. The Add-on lets you simply highlight a word or a sentence in a document and then record a voice comment about that highlighted word or sentence. Voice comments can be used in conjunction with text comments.

If you find yourself frequently writing the same comment or type of comment in your students’ documents then you will want to utilize the canned comments that are available through Kaizena. And now you can also use rubrics in Kaizena.

Today, Kaizena announced the launch of a rubrics feature to go along with their existing voice and text comment tools. Unfortunately, you cannot import a rubric that you have created outside of Kaizena to use in Kaizena. You have to create the rubric within Kaizena by selecting “skills” comments that you write and then grouping them into rubric components. Honestly, I think that the process of creating rubrics within Kaizena is a but cumbersome until you’ve done it a few times. But you can judge that yourself after you look through the directions here.

I like Kaizena for its voice commenting component. The canned text comments and the rubric components are nice, but you can do those things with other tools that are a little easier to use for those purposes. JoeZoo Express (Google Docs Add-on) and Online Rubric (Google Sheets Add-on) are the tool that come to mind for canned comments and rubrics.

Learn more about Google Docs and Google Docs Add-ons in my online course, G Suite for Teachers.