At some point in time, everyone needs to take back something they have said. Today is one of those times for me on this blog.
I wrote a post in May of last year offering a recommendation for an extension which could be used to leave voice comments in a Google Doc. The beginning of the post gave a short backstory on an add-on which did voice comments very nicely. That add-on then did a massive update which was also a redesign of their method for leaving any type of comments. I found the update to be a disservice to their original functionality as well as quite clunky for usability so I stopped recommending it to teachers. Now in the post, I didn’t go as far as to name names, but I still vented some frustration.
Now, over time, we’ve discovered that the extension, which I recommended as a replacement for the add-on, has caused some of our Chromebooks to sloooow doooown. I had to stop suggesting the extension to teachers. Around this same time, I started to see posts about the original add-on:
Kaizena is Back!
The Google Doc add-on has gone back to their roots of having commenting take place within the document. I look forward to sharing this tool with teachers!
Now to give a well-rounded recommendation, I have noticed two items where I think improvements could be made. First, you aren’t aware of the comments left in the document, you only see highlights until you open the add-on. The original functionality of Kaizena inserted a statement as a header explaining what to do to see the text or voice comments. The second improvement is expanding the voice comment limitation of thirty seconds of recording time per comment. Hopefully that can be expended upon.
Glad to see the updates to @KaizenaHQ‘s add-on for @Google Docs, voice comments in a Doc is huge! Wondering if it would be possible to increase add-on record time (30 seconds) to a higher limit like the web app can do… (screenshot of the website) pic.twitter.com/51t5pIYsb6
— Dan Gallagher (@Gallagher_Tech) January 30, 2018
Hey Dan! Glad you like the update. I’ll add that to our feature request list 🙂
— Kaizena (@KaizenaHQ) February 1, 2018