The Feedback Companion is designed to provide teachers with faster and more efficient ways to deliver personalized feedback to students, eliminating repetitive manual tasks and the need for tool-switching.

Access Requirements and Setup

The Feedback Companion is only available for teachers with SpacesEDU Pro. The feature must also be enabled at the district level in order for teachers to have access.

• If you're a school or district lead and you'd like to enable this option for your teachers, please contact us with the messaging option in the corner of your screen, or by emailing hello@spacesedu.com
• The comment bank is unique to the individual teacher and is not shared across classes, meaning multiple teachers in the same class must each add the same comments if they wish to use a consistent bank of feedback with this feature.
• It's easy for teachers to upload their existing comment bank from a file, without needing to manually reformat them for import. SpacesEDU uses AI tools to process and organize the file content, extracting comments and categories. Any data uploaded will be stored securely and is not saved by the AI model.

Accessing the Feedback Companion

Teachers can access the Feedback Companion in multiple ways:

1. Account Settings: A dedicated "Feedback Companion" tab is available within the teacher's Account Settings. Click your initials or avatar at the top right, then Account Settings > Feedback Companion.
2. Assessment: Within your classroom, you can also navigate to the Assessment tab and click Edit Feedback Companion. 
3. Comments: Once you've added comments to the feedback companion, you can access it from many different places in SpacesEDU with the slash key / , or by tapping the 'Open Feedback Companion' button on mobile devices.

• If a teacher has not yet added any comments when opening the feedback companion, an empty state screen will prompt them to begin adding some.
• Once comments have been added, you'll need to use option 1 or 2 above to edit your existing comments or upload more.

Populating Your Comment Bank

Teachers can build their personal repository of frequently used feedback in one of three ways:

1. Uploading Existing Documents

• Teachers can quickly import pre-existing comment banks by clicking Upload File.
• The tool supports .docx (standard Word files) and .txt file types.
• Here is a blank .docx template formatted for optimal use with Feedback Companion - you can save a copy and populate with your comments, then upload into SpacesEDU.
• You can also simply import your existing .docx and .txt files as-is. You may need to edit the formatting slightly in some cases to ensure the comments are parsed correctly.
• The AI is instructed to look for themes and patterns to categorize the content. During parsing, lines starting with −, ∙, or ∗ are treated as comment starts.
• After processing, teachers are given the opportunity to review and edit the extracted comments before selecting "Save Changes" to finalize the upload.

2. Manually Adding New Comments

• You can manually build your comment bank directly in SpacesEDU as well.
• Click the + Add Comment button, which prompts a dialogue box to appear.

• Enter the text you want to save in the Comment field.
• You can optionally organize your comments with a single Category and Sub-Category. Adding a sub-category is disabled until a category has been selected.
• You may select an existing category or create a new one. If you attempt to create a new category using an existing name (case-insensitive), the system will reuse the existing category.

3. Saving Comments Directly from Feeds

• Teachers can save an existing comment directly to their Feedback Companion.
• Navigate to an existing comment in a feed and click the context menu (three dots) associated with the comment.
• Select "Add to Feedback Companion".
• This action opens the Add Comment dialog with the text pre-populated, allowing you to edit and assign categories before saving.

Editing or Deleting Comments

• To edit a comment once it's been added to Feedback Companion, open your Account Settings > Feedback Companion, then click the pencil button on the right-hand side of your screen.
• To delete an existing comment, click the trash icon. Ensure that you've selected the comment you want to delete, then click to confirm.
• If you inadvertently delete a comment, you can use any of the options above to add it back to your feedback companion.
• Editing or deleting individual comments within the Account Settings will not affect any comments already added to posts.
• Similarly, editing a comment that was added with Feedback Companion will not change the saved comment.

Using the Feedback Companion

Once comments have been added, the Feedback Companion can be accessed from many different places in teachers' accounts, including:

• when adding comments on any posts (in classes or portfolios)
• when commenting on activity submissions
• in messages
• in Reporting Space areas of learning and summary statements

1. Opening the Feedback Companion: In the comment or message box, type "/" (forward slash) on your keyboard. The dialog can only be opened with the slash before you start typing anything else in your comment.
2. Inserting Comments: Once the feedback companion menu appears, you can search or filter your saved comments by category and sub-category. Clicking a comment then inserts it into the comment box.
3. Personalization: Saved comments can include the placeholder [name] (e.g., [Name], watch grammar...)

• If the comment targets a single student, [name] is automatically replaced with the student's name (e.g., Alex).
• If the post targets multiple students (such as a group or class post), [name] is replaced with ‘Everyone’.

4. Editing: Teachers retain the ability to edit what they've added in the comment field before posting it.

Constraints

• The character limit for comments is 10,000 characters.
• Teachers are limited to a maximum of 1,000 comments in their Feedback Companion.
• Feedback Companion is unique to each teacher's account and not shared across multiple teachers in the same class.
• Comments in the Feedback Companion are usable across all classes within the teacher's account.
• Comments that do not have any categories applied cannot be filtered.

Updated on: 29/10/2025