Cut Your Grading Time In Half
by Christine Hult
IT’S THE END of an arduous semester and your desk is piled high with student papers. You sigh deeply as you contemplate the days of reading and grading that lie ahead of you. Surely there must be a better way? You’ll be happy to learn that recently developed technologies can help you to handle the paper load. Web course-management systems (e.g. Blackboard or WebCT), initially designed for distance-education courses, also provide classroom teachers with excellent tools to help them manage the deluge of papers they face each term. Word-processing features such as “document comments” and “track changes” help to turn responding and grading papers from a chore to a pleasure (almost). Course management systems help teachers translate their classroom materials into Web-based documents that students can access via the Internet. These systems all provide a similar range of user-friendly course tools, from chat rooms to bulletin boards to gradebooks. Many regular classroom teachers have found that Web classrooms are a convenient way to provide information such as syllabi and class assignments to their students. They also may use a Web classroom to communicate with students between class periods via discussion forums, bulletin boards, e-mail lists, or chat rooms. What many teachers don’t realize, however, is that Web classrooms also provide excellent help for managing student assignments-including both on-line quizzes and written work.
I’ll describe how I use a course management system and Microsoft Word in my sophomore English composition courses to help me handle the paper load. You could adapt these procedures using any course management system available to you. Many such systems are now offered by publishers free of charge when you adopt a particular textbook (e.g. CourseCompass from Pearson Education). Prior to the start of the semester, I set up my Web classrooms using SyllaBase, a course management system developed by the English department at Utah State University (www.3gb.com). I upload my syllabus, course policies, and assignments as well as a calendar that indicates when assignments are due. I also set up the “homework manager” that will automatically post to students’ Web pages the course assignments as they are due. Since I am teaching a writing course, most of the assignments are essays and written projects, although I do give a few quizzes on items of grammar and usage.
By using a homework manager that logs assignments as they are turned in and keeps track of assignments for me, I no longer have that old paper shuffle. You know, the times when you drag all the papers to class only to find that three students are absent. Their papers sit in your office, unclaimed, until either you or the students remember to retrieve them. If students are absent the day papers are returned, it doesn’t matter, since they are all stored electronically in the Web classroom. I don’t have to haul papers home with me either; I simply retrieve them off the Internet when I’m ready to read them, whether I’m at home, in the office, or even in a hotel room at a conference. What about those students who habitually turn in late work? You can set the homework manager to “reject” any papers that aren’t uploaded by your deadline.
The homework manager can also be configured to allow students multiple submissions of their work, for the times when you intend to read successive drafts of assignments as students work on them. The homework manager keeps track of when each draft was submitted by a student or returned by me with my comments. This system allows me to read drafts of student work in progress, at the point of need, and not just when it is turned in for final grading. We know from years of research in composition that such guided practice, providing focused feedback during the students’ actual writing process, is what helps writers to improve the most. I don’t know about you, but since I started writing at a keyboard, my handwriting has deteriorated to the point where it is indecipherable, even to myself!
By responding to student writing electronically, I never have to worry about translating my illegible comments for students. Rather, I use the “insert/comment” feature of my word processing program to put comments into the student papers at the relevant location in their documents. This feature, now common in word processing programs, is one of the best technological innovations to help teachers handle the paper load. I find that I can download and respond to student drafts (using the homework manager and document comments) much more quickly than I could using hand-written comments. Besides, I can elaborate as much or as little as I like with document comments. As you can see in the figure above, the document comments are indicated by highlighting in the text. When the mouse is held over the highlighting, the comment box will appear.
Students find this a much less obtrusive way of commenting on their papers; in other words, you are not denigrating their work by writing (bleeding) all over it with your pen. Rather, you are making constructive comments and suggestions that they, as writers, can consider and respond to. When students revise their work, I have them revise and upload the commented copies via the homework manager so that there is a record of their work and of the ways in which they have followed up on my suggestions. This is also a terrific mental aid for me-often when I’ve read subsequent drafts, I can’t recall the advice I gave on the first round! With document comments, we are all operating from the same assumptions.
Plus, they can comment back to me as well, asking specific questions and seeking guidance on their writing. I also frequently have them use another terrific word-processing technology called “track changes” when they begin to work on revising their drafts (see figure 2). In the “tools” menu of Word, select “track changes/highlight changes” to turn on this feature (WordPerfect has a similar feature called “review document”). Once the “highlight changes” is activated, every change made to the document will be recorded visually, using color, strike-outs, underlines, etc. How changes are highlighted can be customized at the “tools/options/track changes” menu. I use this feature in a number of ways–when students are revising and resubmitting a draft via the homework manager, but also when I want to illustrate appropriate editing and revising in a brief section of a paper–which they can then emulate throughout the rest of the paper. Often I have peers edit and comment on each other’s papers, using both “document comments” and “track changes”; the writer can either “accept or reject” those suggestions at the track changes menu.
The papers can be exchanged by students at a file-sharing space on the Web classroom, as attachments to a post in a discussion forum, or via e-mail attachments. No more endless photocopying for peer reviews of each other’s essays! Students can learn how to read and respond to each others’ work electronically at the same time as they are learning the importance of revision. If you are not yet convinced that technology can help you to handle the paper load, try one of these commenting techniques with your next writing assignment, perhaps using e-mail attachments as the method of paper exchange. You don’t need to do everything at once; start small and take incremental steps toward using more technology in your classes. My co-author (Tom Huckin) and I describe these techniques, plus many more, in our writing textbook, The New Century Handbook, 2nd ed. (Allyn & Bacon/Longman, 2002), the only handbook on the market today completely written with computer users in mind. It is a fact that students are all writing with computers now, so we teachers might as well capitalize on that fact. To do so will benefit not only our students, but ourselves as well.
