Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom
This week, my students wrote on-demand essays as their final task for our unit on The Awakening. Since they will have to take the SBAC in a few weeks on computers, I decided that I would have them write this on-demand essay on Chromebooks instead of by hand.
First, let me point out the one problem I always run into whenever I have my students write on-demand essays on computers instead of by hand:
Yes. That's right. In my first period class, I had 16 students who did not finish and/or turn in the assignment. When I have my students write on-demand essays by hand, they do not leave unless they turn in their essay, which means I get work from all of my students. Fortunately, in this case, I can see what those 16 students worked on because all the files were shared with me; however, I still had more than a handful of students who did not write more than an introduction.
In any case, I've started grading the assignments. I decided to try out Doctopus and Goobric, two Google Add-ons that help by auto-generating a class spreadsheet and connecting a rubric to each student assignment.
The first step was to create a blank spreadsheet. Then, I went to "Add-ons" and selected "Doctopus." After selecting the class that I wanted, a spreadsheet that looked like this was created:
It includes all of my students's names and links to their assignments.
Then, I opened up my rubric through Goobric. (It took me a little while to figure out how to do this, so I decided to watch a couple of videos on how to do it.) Opening my rubric through Goobric linked a rubric to each of the assignments listed on the spreadsheet above. When I open up one of the assignments in Goobric, it looks like this:
The rubric criteria and scores are at the top, and the assignment itself is at the bottom. This allows me to read and grade each essay in one screen. When I'm done, I simply hit "submit," and the scores are automatically saved in the student's copy of the assignment and in the spreadsheet created by Doctopus. In the past, I used to have to make a copy of my rubric for each student and then share it with the student. It wasn't too difficult, but it did add at least 1 or 2 minutes onto grading each assignment. That might not seem like a lot, but it is anywhere from an additional hour and a half to 3 hours of grading when I am working on grading an assignment for my 11th graders. This method cuts all of that time out of my grading. Yay!
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Ease of use: As I said, it took me a while to figure out how to link create the rubric and link it through Goobric. I highly recommend watching some of the videos I linked above on YouTube. Once you figure it out, it is a piece of cake; it's just that you have to format everything correctly in order for it to work.
Would I use this again: Yes. I really like these tools. There is also an option for me to record some of my comments, so I've been creating audio-recordings for each student, explaining what they need to fix. This saves time for me in typing, and I feel like it helps since I am not going to have time to sit down with each student and conference with them about what they need to work on.
Downsides: I don't really see any downsides with the Goobric and Doctopus, aside from having to be sure you have the formatting correct. Also, if you want to create an audio-comment, you need to make sure you don't have a two-year-old talking about who has a penis and who doesn't have a penis in the background...
Applications: You could use this for any assignment you have students turn in through Google Classroom that you use a rubric to grade. I think you can use these tools without Google Classroom as well, but then you would have to put the information into the spreadsheet yourself.
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Ease of use: As I said, it took me a while to figure out how to link create the rubric and link it through Goobric. I highly recommend watching some of the videos I linked above on YouTube. Once you figure it out, it is a piece of cake; it's just that you have to format everything correctly in order for it to work.
Would I use this again: Yes. I really like these tools. There is also an option for me to record some of my comments, so I've been creating audio-recordings for each student, explaining what they need to fix. This saves time for me in typing, and I feel like it helps since I am not going to have time to sit down with each student and conference with them about what they need to work on.
Downsides: I don't really see any downsides with the Goobric and Doctopus, aside from having to be sure you have the formatting correct. Also, if you want to create an audio-comment, you need to make sure you don't have a two-year-old talking about who has a penis and who doesn't have a penis in the background...
Applications: You could use this for any assignment you have students turn in through Google Classroom that you use a rubric to grade. I think you can use these tools without Google Classroom as well, but then you would have to put the information into the spreadsheet yourself.
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UCI Highlighter
This is a tool I learned about through some of the professional development I'm part of this year. It is a website that lets students highlight their essays and automatically calculates how much of the essay is summary, commentary, and evidence. I found the tool extremely helpful in talking to my students about how they should not just be summarizing in their essays.
In order to use the tool in class, I gave my students handouts with a sample introduction, body paragraph, and conclusion from an essay I wrote in college. As a class, we worked through underlining the introduction. We used yellow for summary, green for evidence, and blue for commentary. As you can imagine, most of the introduction was either yellow or blue. Then, I had them work in groups to underline their body paragraphs. Once they finished their body paragraphs, I had them nominate a group member to get a Chromebook and go to the UCI Highlighter website. In order to log in, all they had to do was go to www.ucihighlighter.com and then type in "lewis comparison" in the box. (This was the name under which I created the sample assignment.) They then found and highlighted their sample paragraph in the longer essay. Like Google Docs, each student's screen updated in real-time, so they were able to see what the other groups were highlighting. After every group finished, it looked like this:
In order to use the tool in class, I gave my students handouts with a sample introduction, body paragraph, and conclusion from an essay I wrote in college. As a class, we worked through underlining the introduction. We used yellow for summary, green for evidence, and blue for commentary. As you can imagine, most of the introduction was either yellow or blue. Then, I had them work in groups to underline their body paragraphs. Once they finished their body paragraphs, I had them nominate a group member to get a Chromebook and go to the UCI Highlighter website. In order to log in, all they had to do was go to www.ucihighlighter.com and then type in "lewis comparison" in the box. (This was the name under which I created the sample assignment.) They then found and highlighted their sample paragraph in the longer essay. Like Google Docs, each student's screen updated in real-time, so they were able to see what the other groups were highlighting. After every group finished, it looked like this:
We talked about the percentages over on the side.
They noticed that "Commentary" had the highest percentage, followed by "Evidence." They also noticed that there wasn't very much summary.
They noticed that "Commentary" had the highest percentage, followed by "Evidence." They also noticed that there wasn't very much summary.
As a follow-up to this activity, I am going to have them highlight the essays that they just wrote to see where they fall in these different categories. The goal is to get them away from summary and into using evidence to support their commentary.
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Ease of use: This was extremely easy. The only kinks we ran into were when students misspelled "highlighter" or did not enter "lewis comparison" correctly.
Would I use this again: Yep. As I mentioned above, I am going to do another activity this week using the same tool.
Downsides: The website doesn't keep the formatting, so I had to go through and make sure my paragraphs looked okay.
Applications: Writing and revising essays
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Ease of use: This was extremely easy. The only kinks we ran into were when students misspelled "highlighter" or did not enter "lewis comparison" correctly.
Would I use this again: Yep. As I mentioned above, I am going to do another activity this week using the same tool.
Downsides: The website doesn't keep the formatting, so I had to go through and make sure my paragraphs looked okay.
Applications: Writing and revising essays
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Bonus!
Inadvertently, I made a discovery with the comments in Google Docs. I have always been a little annoyed that you can't bold, underline, or italicize words in the comments. Therefore, in order to add emphasize to one of the words in one of my comments, I put stars around the word. When I posted the comment, it turned bold! Look:
So cool!
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