Annotating and Grading Student Papers Electronically

Because I hurt my knee and couldn't drive to class for a week, for the first time ever I asked my students to submit their research paper drafts electronically.  I've avoided this until now for a couple of reasons.  I read at lightning speed, and I can cover more ground with a hard copy of a paper.  Before I start grading I go through a norming process for that class, reading through a number of papers rapidly until I get a feel for the general range, then I sort them into piles:  likely A's, Average, and Major Problems.  I like to mark up the papers with pen or pencil, making circles, arrows, and comments in the margin.  For longer comments (like lack of thesis, structure or organization issues) I have a Word document of comment boilerplate that I adapt to each student, then print and return with the annotated paper.

But this year, I have a choice.  I've asked them to submit the papers through Turnitin.  My college doesn't subscribe to the GradeMark commenting function of Turnitin, but I can download or print the papers, so now I have to decide:  Print and proceed as usual, or try annotating the papers electronically.
If I print, OK, it's a pain and it costs me some money, but I own a laser printer, so it's not THAT big a deal.  There is the filename issue - since 90% have named their files "research paper," I have to make sure I rename as I download so I don't overwrite.   But then I have to shlep the papers to class.  Students have to wait for my comments until we meet again, and I'm trying to travel light since I'm still on crutches. 

If I download and annotate using Word's comments function, I won't be able to norm the same rapidfire way I usually do.  Maybe I don't need to do this anymore - I've been grading research papers for a long, long time now.  And I know from my freelance editing jobs, it always takes longer to edit and comment with the Word comments function.  Many freelancers actually charge a bit more to provide comments in Word, for this very reason.

For help in this weighty decision, I consulted my oracle - that is, I googled, "Should I comment on my student papers using Word's comment function, or on hard copy?"  And lo and behold, it came up with a third option:  Grading papers on the iPad, as described in a fantastically useful post in Offprints, a blog by Caleb McDaniel of Rice University's History department. In it he describes how he converts all of his students' papers into .pdf files, dumps them onto his iPad, and then uses an app called iAnnotate which allows him to circle, mark up, and insert comments into little boxes, after which he e-mails them back to the students.  Make sure to read the comments, which also describe how to append a rubric to the student papers automatically.  McDaniel says apart from convenience, one important benefit of using the iPad is that it helps him refrain from overdoing it - he believes in minimal marking, which holds that too many comments on student papers - especially for "surface errors" like misspelling and improper punctuation -  actually hurt the learning process.

The iPad solution seems to me the most tempting, not only because I could mark up to my heart's content, and wouldn't have to schlep papers, but especially because it gives me an excuse buy an iPad.

DIY #1: Change the World

There used to be a bookstore in Philadelphia called the How To Do It Bookstore, and it was one of my favorite places in the whole world. Shelves and shelves of everything a do-it-yourselfer could dream of: knitting, cooking, fixing the car, mountain climbing, brewing beer, remodeling the house, painting faux finishes on furniture (I bought that one), you name it. Not so much of a need for it anymore, I suppose, now that we have the web and personal video and editing is accessible to anyone with a cellphone camera and a data connection. (Although I think books do have their place, especially if you're out in a freezing henhouse trying to help that egg-bound chicken - not the place for the laptop, really.)

We're working on instructional videos now in my Visual Design and Communication course. I love this project, because I'm a big fan of DIY. So for inspiration I'm posting this video by Montreal animator JC Little with simple instructions on how to change the world.



It's got everything I like - clear sound and clean design, and best of all clear instructions. We should all be able to change the world right after viewing this. Let's get started!

Visuals Can Change Everything

Reading the obituary of Apple founder Steve Jobs brought me back to the late 70s, when personal computers had blinking green or amber screens that consisted entirely of text, and commands were given in code.

In 1979 Jobs visited the Xerox research center in Palo Alto, "where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system...that used a mouse pointing device [and] was one of the first computers to employ a graphical video display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office desktop."
"'It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments,' Mr. Jobs said of his visit...'I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday.  It was so obvious once you saw it.  It didn't require tremendous intellect.  It was so clear.'"

Jobs went on in 1981 to begin developing the Macintosh, which was released in January 1984 and introduced during the Super Bowl with a now-famous commercial "that linked I.B.M., by then the dominant PC maker, with Orwell's Big Brother."  The Mac, of course, was distinguished by the first commercial use of a graphical interface using icons, drag-and-drop, and other things we all take for granted now. 
So the Mac distinguished itself and changed the computing world forever because of Jobs's attention to visual design - not just for aesthetics but because he understood the exponential difference visuals made in functionality. The graphical interface made it intuitive and made personal computing accessible.  Bill Gates later made his fortune by figuring out how to cloak the old DOS operating system in a graphical interface like that of Macintosh.  He called it "Windows."

Source of quotations - New York Times, Oct. 5, 2011

Penultimate Week in High School

Just came across something I wrote at the end of school last year, and thought I'd post it in honor of the weather turning this weekend:

Going up the stairs in the morning we ascend into a damp cloud of still air, still stinking faintly of the hundreds of teenaged bodies that passed through the stairwell the day before.  Nothing on Junior Hallway has cooled off or aired out from yesterday.  The June heat wave left all of us wilted, the students whining and sweating in their polyester uniforms, the teachers cranky as we tried to force out the last lessons on the last Wednesday before finals.  I trudge up behind a great beast of a boy who sighs and moans as he feel the air press down, suffocating.  The hallway when we reach it is no better, and teenagers in flipflops and uniforms grumble as they change into their uniform shoes and stow bags and books in lockers, complaining about the heat. 

In class I lay the ground rules.  “No whining about the you-know-what,” I say, gesturing toward the blazing light outside the window.  “Also, no touching the fan.  They are scientifically positioned for maximum air circulation."  

This gets their attention, and a couple of boys and girls look around at the fans, checking to see if this might be true.   

"I don’t want to hear anyone talking about the heat."  A couple of kids look defiant, but they're too hot to pursue it.   I continue: "The only thing I want to hear you talk about is ice cream, ice cubes, ice skating, ice hockey, or ice pops.  Cold mountain streams.  Baby pools.  Got it?”   

They all groan. 

“Why baby pools?” asks the nearest boy, sweating over his notebook.   

“It just popped into my mind,” I answer.  I take attendence, and we try to finish up the Cold War and Korean War.  Nobody wants to, but we do it anyway.  It's June.  

[June 9, 2011]

 

First day of class with Polleverywhere: What is Art?

The first day of class is often a rut:  go-over-the-syllabus, fill-out-the-index-card, how-many-are-freshmen first day activities, blah, blah, blah.  This time, I decided to learn about my class demographic and share the results  live with the class using Polleverywhere, a free web tool that uses cellphones like classroom clickers.

Ahead of time, I went on the Polleverywhere site and created a few polls asking questions like, "What is your year in college," whether they'd ever taken an art history class or written a research paper before, what their majors are, and so on.  I had some of that info on my course list online, but I thought it would help build rapport if the students could learn about each other in a novel way.

Now here's the cool part.  I embedded a link to Polleverywhere in my pedestrian first-day-of-class powerpoint, and then in class, when we got to that slide, I clicked and went to the Polleverywhere site.  "How many people have cell phones?" I asked.  I think they thought I was going to ask them to turn off the ringers.  Nope. "Use your cell phones to text messages to this number up on the screen, answering the questions.  You 'vote' for your answer, just like American Idol. "
I totally had their attention.  Everyone whipped out their cell phone and got going with the first question, their year at college.  They texted or used smartphone web access to the numbers onscreen.   As their answers reached the screen, we could see the bars on the graph change right before our eyes.
Here are the results of the first question:

 The students were fascinated.  I asked if any of them had ever done this before, and none of them had.  I heard a few people remark that it was "cool."

We did a few more basic questions about who they are.  Here's one:

At the very bottom right of the screenshot above you can see "total results" in which Polleverywhere updates live the number of responses it has received.  There were about 33 people in the classroom, and 30 answered this question.  I use the old-fashioned classroom teacher pencil rule to decide when to continue - when 3/4 of the pencils stop moving, you start talking.  So for Polleverywhere, I wait until about 3/4 of the class has posted its answer.

After we got to know each other a bit, I started a poll question that dealt with the content of the course.  We'd been talking about art and art history all through the class, so  I asked:  "So, what is art, anyway?"  Poll everywhere lets texted or web-input answers float up onto the screen in real time, so everyone could see them. Here are some of the responses:

After we had a good number of answers,  I elicited patterns in them - e.g. many definitions had "expression" or "self-expression" in them; an important subset said art is difficult or impossible to define; and we questioned whether art bore any relationship to "life" or "reality" based on the responses, questions of intention and reception, and so on  I also pointed out that no one had mentioned "skill" in any of their definitions.  We then compared our definitions to some dictionary definitions of art that I had brought along.

Recognizing art and art worlds as historically situated is one of the course goals, so I plan to raise this question "What is art?" every so often as we progress from the Renaissance to the present, so students can revise and develop their definitions, and we can think about how the definition of art has changed over time.

We also got to practice using the web tool, so now the students are familiar with it for whenever I want to use it in a lesson.

Issues:  Poll everywhere didn't display on the screen the same way it had at home on my computer, so bits of some of my questions were not visible.  To be fair, they do warn you in the instructions to practice the poll on the computer and display system you will be using.  I didn't.  Live and learn.  It still worked out great!

Other issue - I had too many intro questions. It does take a little while to text in all those numbers.  If I upgrade, I think I can make it a little more seamless, but at the moment it's a bit expensive for an adjunct.

Back to school, in a green way

Great storage idea for teachers from a really cool blog about, of all things, storage: Storage Glee

To post notes or not to post notes, that is the question.

Recently, on a listserv I subscribe to, a new Advanced Placement course teacher wondered whether he should post his outline of the textbook for his students, or let them take their own notes.  He wrote:

Hi everyone,
> First time AP Euro teacher here, and was hoping for some advice on the topic of class notes. I have several colleagues who favor providing their students with the notes for the course, and several who do not (it has grown into a long-running debate at department meetings). Traditionally I have agreed with the point of view that the work of actually taking the notes is in itself quite important to the learning process. Now, I recently finished outlining the text book we will be using(McKay, 10th ed), and am on the fence whether I should post the notes to my website or not. As I said, my gut instinct is telling me not to, but I have noticed there are several AP teachers who do provide their students with notes. Being that this is my first attempt at an AP curriculum I was hoping to get some more experienced opinions on the matter. Do you provide your students with a set of notes? Has it worked for you in the past? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

> Mike

Here's what one teacher replied:

Do not most university professors have all notes, assignments, etc. al. on their websites?
I do understand your desire to teach your students note taking skills....but are not many summaries, etc. on line for their use anyway?
Almost all of the AP World, AP European, AP US textbooks with their ancillaries and supplementals  provide chapter notes for students on their websites.
I might humbly suggest that students should be taught to "use" the historical information (notes), data, and narrative analytically, ie., seeing change over time, continuity over time, comparative (also contrast) and analyzing POV [point of view] in primary sources to finding truth in the past.  In other words using historical notes from diverse sources to understand historical processes. 

And here's what I added to the discussion:

While I thought the way Mike did going into my first year teaching AP, I found that when I didn't provide notes, many students searched out and printed notes from various online sources, which many of them annotated in class.  Also, in practice I found out the hard way that the pace I had to move at was too fast for such idealism.  I found that if I provided the students with powerpoint notes or even with old-fashioned lecture outlines on the blackboard, that they did take notes during class anyway.  It simply allowed me to go much faster,  and it helped them understand and retain better.  

Ditto for our textbook.  It depends on how well-organized your textbook is and what kinds of signposting and online resources it provides, but students did find it helpful to have some way of knowing what *I* thought was important in the torrent of information the book provided.  I did this by having them fill out a reading "quiz" for homework before we started each chapter (I didn't make these quizzes up myself but modified them from quizzes I found on one of the many wonderful, generous AP teachers' websites.).  They got a modest number of homework points for completing these quizzes, and we went over them quickly in class but I did not grade them.

 About three quarters of the way through the year, I also started a blog (I used Blogspot, and there are others you can use like Wordpress etc. If your school provides you with space on its website, that can work too) where I posted homework, project requirements, links to resources and cool websites we didn't have time for in class, and other information.  Even with my stumbling first efforts at this, I have to say it made life easier for everyone. 

As an improvement for this year and to save the burden of photocopying, I would put the Powerpoints or notes up on a free service like Wikispaces (sign up for a free educational account, which allows you to sign up multiple users at once and restrict access if you like) and Slideshare and let students download and print them themselves.   I would post the links to these sites on the blog so the students could find them again whenever they needed to.  I don't think it is doing their work for them.  The students who want to learn will appreciate it and will continue to work hard, as is their custom, and those who want to cut corners will do that anyway, whether you put up the notes or not.  Everything is moving in that direction anyway (see "The Flipped Classroom"). 

What Mike is really asking is, "How do I make sure my students are learning actively?"  Note-taking (done correctly) is one way of learning actively, but it's not the only way.  Don't agonize over it.  Put the notes up and provide opportunities for active learning and synthesis other ways, with classroom activities, discussion, well-designed projects, web quests, graphic organizers (I used to call them "tables," "charts," and "diagrams" ;-)) and so many other things we've seen on the boards (including note-taking!). You can always stop putting up notes it if it's not working for your class.