Necessity is the Mother of All Invention

Necessity is the Mother of All Invention

 

Just 10 minutes ago, I was grading some assignments that students had submitted electronically via creating a Drop and e-mailing/wiki messaging the link to me.  I'm aware that this is a "cheap" way of going paperless (they used paper to do the assignment, they just didn't turn it in).  The point of this was to get students to start thinking about ways to make things paperless.  While generating the correct solutions, my thoughts were, "How am I going to provide feedback?" 

 

So, the idea I had was to create one Google Document per student.  I would write any and all feedback for the assignment on the Google Doc and send them the link.  They could check their grade and their feedback whenever they chose to, and they wouldn't have to wait for me to give the paper back to them.  In a math classroom, there's learning that takes place in decoding the feedback that your teacher has given you.  It also makes it hard for me to just put a red circle around what's incorrect, I now have to articulate (you lost a negative sign when you were combining like terms).

 

Then I started thinking about, "What if I graded/assessed my students like this all year?"  In moving towards a standards-based grading approach, this would be an amazing way to assess kids.  Just writing about what they've done well and not well, I'd be able to pull together a good picture of what they've done throughout the year.  I would list each skill, then write feedback underneath/with the skill.  If a student repeats an assessment, I would simply add/change feedback, or denote that another assessment was taken.  At the end of the marking period, I'd be able to pull together whether the skill is mastered, partly mastered, basic ability, or below basic ability on that skill.  So that they could see where they stand on every skill, they would each have their own personal document

 

Here's the Prototype.

 

Your comments are appreciated.  I'm not sure if it's a time-saver, but I think it allows me to give much better feedback and it's useful in standards based grading.