Grading in a Social Tech Integrated Classroom

Have put a lot of thought into how I am going to grade students this year, and I've decided on the following.

First of all, I'm not giving any tests or quizzes.

At least none of the traditional variety.

Instead, based on a 100 point scale per quarter: 50 points will be given for daily blogging and social bookmarking, 10 points will be giving for a series of Pixton-based vocab/terminology checks, and 40 points will be earned for completing two projects of the student's design and interest.

Abuse of Twitter and our social media community ends up in minus-5 points and a referral to the dean.

And that's it.

I'm especially excited about the blogging because that was so successful last year; I am equally excited about the social bookmarking, as I think it will encourage students to explore more widely. For these two tasks, the student will earn 50 points (.5 point per blog post up to 25 points; .5 point per bookmarks up to 25 points). They must maintain a daily schedule and I'll be regularly checking to see that they are taking the task seriously and not just giving me fluff. Part of the way I plan to do this is by having them annotate their bookmarks in Diigo. That'll also give us the latitude to share and mark up each other's findings which promises to be fun.

To give a little guidance to the blog posts, each day of the week will be themed, each day corresponding to a question; so Monday is 'Who', Tues 'What', Weds 'When', Thurs 'Where', and Fri 'Why'. This will be applied to history, grammar, literature, music... whatever we happen to be talking about that week in class.

As for Pixton, I found last year that this was hands-down the most effective tool for helping students remember vocab. Basically they create, share, and remix their own Web 2.0-based comics; each comic demonstrates the vocab or terminology in narrative form.

The two quarterly projects are going to be specific and based on student interest. I'm going to let this grow organically and will get back to you all on where it leads.

I'm going to take the approach that we are all starting at the bottom of the mountain and that our blogs, bookmarks, comics, and projects are the tools we use to get to the top of the mountain. I've just finally come to the point in my teaching where I don't like the sort of attitude and classroom environment that traditional testing and grading wind up producing. So I'm trying to create an assessment experience that better reflects the social tech thrust of my teaching.

I'm very excited for our prospects this year. It'll be my first year teaching World History and I'm really looking forward to teaching three Freshman classes -- integrating social tech into their academic experience and expectations from the very start of their high school careers.

Using Google Docs to Grade Student Essays Online

Reader Kax has got a great idea for grading student essays online:

I am having students use Google Documents to write their assignments and then share the document with me. I can grade them at school or at home and can type my comments right into their document.

You can also open up the Google Doc and share it with classmate partners or teams of students for peer review. Google Docs will actually track the changes each Doc member makes, so you can even grade students on the quality of their editing by going back and looking through the history of each revision on an individual contributor level (sort of like what you can do on Wikipedia when you check the history of a wiki).

Good stuff, Kax!

Quick Four-Step-Guide to Grading Essays Online

A colleague writes:

How do teachers grade formal writing effectively and efficiently online when you have a student load of 100? I have tried countless times to grade from the dropbox, and I always end up giving up, because students are sloppy about submissions, I can't grade easily on the go, and it takes a much longer time to open the documents.

Dropboxes are a pain in the keester.

I suggest the following admittedly DIY strategy:

1. Have the kids post their essays on a blog. There's no reason why you should have to manage dozens of unwieldy Word documents. Plus, if it's posted to a blog, you can easily grade it from anywhere you can connect.

2. Cut-and-Paste the student's essay into a Word program.

3. Comment on the paper in 'Comments Mode' and record your grade.

4. Email the edited version back to the student.

Bam! You're done! The one thing the super-savvy among you may try is to convert the paper into a pdf before sending it back to the student; you can do this in Acrobat Pro or via Open Office. [ADD 2.12.09 5:24PM] Then the student may post the essay with the teacher's comments on their blog.