This school year, I went paperless in my classroom. I was super tired of having assignments cluttering up my desk and looming at me as if to say “GRADE ME”. I learned a lot when we had to do remote teaching, I think that trying new things and taking risks was reinforced in me, so I took the plunge. The students were quite capable of taking pictures of their work or typing assignments and submitting everything digitally through our LMS. I was then able to give them meaningful feedback digitally as well. This freed up so much so space for me as the teacher not having to keep track of various papers or inboxes being fully of back assignments that needed to be graded. This was something that I have been working towards for many years, but never really thought that I would get there. This past school year proved that I could do it, while it required some fundamental changes in how I run my class I don’t think that I will be going back to collecting paper or project work.
Digital Assignments:
In the past as teachers turned paper assignments into digital assignments, the “lift and shift” mentality was the thinking process. However this typically didn’t translate into effective digital or online assignments. While the assignment’s directions and introduction found on paper handouts would/could be transposed over, the inclusion of visual (charts, diagrams, pictures) is often left out. Additionally, support materials and resources are often not created due to a variety of reasons, this can be due to the teacher’s lack of knowledge of digital creation tools or other lack of digital content creation. It is these support materials that are the most critical component to effective online assignments as students may be working in an environment where they don’t have direct access to the teacher such as at home outside of school hours. That means they should have all necessary and needed resources to answer any questions they have and be able to complete the assignment without the need for interventions. This is where some of the hard work comes into play in planning out the appropriate support materials without giving students direct answers. The component that is often missing are grading rubrics, these rubrics can help students to direct their work efforts, especially in PBL units. When students know what the grading scheme or criteria are, they can make determinations about where to put effort, which in turn allows them to be more effective and productive.
Online Grading Process:
When I went paperless I had to figure out a reliable process for grading submitted work. The primary problem that I faced was that work could be digital, written and physical in its form, which left me with the question of how are the physical assignments submitted. The simple answer to this was pictures and digital documents. I trained my students in how to take appropriate pictures of physical work and enough pictures to fully document their process and their end product. As for physical handouts, I found that it was easier to post the Word or Google Docs that I had already created the hands in rather than printing and scanning back for students to submit. I then turned to rubrics to build the assessment tools that I would use to grade the work that students had been doing. Since I have always liked have quantifiable data to make decisions about curriculum and student progress I turned to my state benchmarks to begin the process of constructing rubrics. The LMS I have used quite a bit in the past, Moodle had an outcome feature that would allow me to put in line items that could then be pulled into rubrics. These line items allowed me to be more consistent when I was assessing various topics such file naming, grammar or various other topics. For specific topics or tasks, I built what I call task-specific items, these are assessment line items that target a specific skill or concept that is not covered by my state benchmarks. These rubrics were one of the most significant changes in my grading practice as this allowed me to quantify student learning and give parents evidence about their individual student’s learning. I then added in direct feedback to students about individual assignments. This allowed students to better understand problems or reasons they got marked down on their assignments. I then built the expectation into my classes that students should use the feedback to correct/redo work rather than taking the grade and moving on. This lead me to doing away with extra credit in my class to reinforce the makeup/feedback process.
Grading & Feedback:
Feedback has become one of the most important aspects of grading, as it gives student insight into the problems they are having with their assignments or project, but also feedback points students in the directions of solutions to those problems. While many have relied on premade paper rubrics for many grading tasks, I think that building rubrics around a set of pre-defined standards helps to build a better overall grading. I found that as I was giving feedback it took time to type out the various comments, but also that most of the comments were centered around the same topics and mistakes. I started to standardize these comments and kept them in mini-lists. This allowed me to copy and past the comments into assignments quickly and easily, speeding up my grading process but also giving students significantly more insight into what they are were doing and facilitating the make-up/correction process.