Managing Electronic Late Work

Figuring out your system for organizing online paperwork can sometimes take a little trial and error. This week, I had two teachers share how they keep their sanity with electronic late work, and when they showed me, I had one of those "Huh. Why didn't I think of that?" moments. Maybe you already have your method perfected. Maybe you did think of this. But just in case you didn't, I give you...the Electronic Late Work Form!

Overall, the teachers utilize the same process. There is a stack of little forms by the class turn-in tray. When a student turns in an assignment electronically, he/she also picks up one of the forms, takes two seconds to fill it out, and turns it into the tray. The form then serves dual purposes. First, it not only informs the teacher that the assignment was turned in, but also tells the teacher where it was turned in, which is probably the more important of the two. (Knowing it was turned in doesn't speed things up a whole lot if the assignment is aimlessly wandering the halls of Google High School.) Second, the form becomes a receipt for the student; after the teacher grades the assignment, she writes the "graded date" on the form before returning it to the student.

Here are both versions of the form that teachers said I could share with you. Version A is only available as a Word document because Google goofed up the formating. Version B is a little more elaborate and available as a Google Doc.

If you have another method to manage the digital madness, I'd love to hear about it. Please email me or leave a note in the comments.

District English Google Calendar

If you teach English in one of the SFSD high schools, the District English Google calendar was recently shared with you. Events on this calendar are updated regularly to reflect the most current information. As it is a Google calendar, you may choose whether or not you wish to allow it to show in your normal Google calendar by adjusting the settings. If you select to hide the calendar now, you may always go back into the settings and select to show it.

Information Available on This Calendar

For All English Teachers

*No School days

*Inservices

*Semester Test Previews

*Semester Tests

*Grading Windows

*Teacher Workdays

*Conferences

*Upcoming Professional Development Conferences (This is merely for information purposes as teachers must apply to the travel committee to attend these.)

*There are NO Director Called Meetings during a Curriculum Study, but starting in the fall of 2017, you will see DCMs on this calendar as well.

For Teachers on Curriculum Writing Teams

*Curriculum Writing Team meetings

*Due dates for curriculum components

Goobric Now Offers Voice Comments

It looks like I may have been a little eager to share the Goobric updates! Another update was released this weekend that allows users to leave voice comments on a Google Doc via the Goobric app. Yippee! The 10-minute tutorial (posted just today!) walks users through the Goobric steps for leaving feedback. If you are familiar with Goobric, you can skip to 5:43 to view the steps regarding how to leave voice comments.

Doctopus, Goobric, and Docappender...Oh My!

There has been an upswing in the number of teachers utilizing Google Classroom this semester, and a common concern I've heard is one regarding losing the ability to run various scripts and add-ons with student Google Docs. Thankfully, there are a number of fantastic tools connected to Google Drive that you can still access for assignments created through Google Classroom, specifically Doctopus and Goobric.

Andrew Stillman recently posted on Google+ regarding some improvements to the Doctopus and Goobric partnership and improvements to how they interact with assignments created through Google Classroom, and he should know because he helped designed them. After searching YouTube, I came across the video below regarding how to make use of Doctopus and Goobric through Google Classroom. (Posted just a week ago on January 9, 2015, it is the most up-to-date explanation I could find.) It is about 17 minutes, but it contains great information on how to utilize the two to give students feedback using an online rubric. (Disclaimer: It is more of an explanation and overview than an actual tutorial, but it does cover some of the basics.) If you are crunched for time, the first ~11 minutes covers Doctopus and Goobric. One nice piece about using Goobric is that you can provide your students with digital rubric-based feedback and still easily enter comments on the student's Google Doc as it is all viewed in the same window.

If you do have the time to watch the entire 17 minutes, please do! The last segment is focused on a tool called Docappender. I was unfamiliar with Docappender until viewing this video, and I am intrigued. Docappender gives you the ability to add a student self-assessment piece to the feedback process. And, due to some Googly magic, these three tools combine their powers and record all of the feedback on the student's original document. The student's document ends up with the teacher's rubric-based feedback and comments, and the student's self-assessment added to the end.

If you would like a tutorial on how to do the entire process of using Doctopus and Goobric through the Google Classroom platform, the following video is a great place to start. It is ~7 minutes and walks you through each step. It was posted in early December, 2014, so it is fairly recent.

Whew! Anyone else tired from just thinking about all of those feedback opportunities? If you give these pieces a try, I'd love to hear about your experience. And, if you'd like to look at these pieces together, just send me an email and we'll find a time.

Go forth and give effective feedback!