Snow Days & Stomach Bugs in the Paperless Classroom

You may have noticed that it has been a while since I last blogged... since November... which coincides with the start of swim season (look for a future post on what edtech stuff I'm doing with the swimteam).  Between practices, meets, and keeping up with the other day-to-day activities of teaching and family, I've neglected my blog, but today's surprise snow day offers up some "free" time to write.

Germs & Bugs
I've been wondering about the unintended effects of having a paperless classroom.  Up until this week, I've been fairly healthy this school year, but I was stricken with a stomach bug Tuesday morning, which just so happened to be the day after I collected a stack of department-mandated Quarterly exams from every one of my freshman English students on Monday.  Could this be a mere coincidence? Probably not, considering students have been absent for the same reason. So this begs the question, how germ-ridden are student papers? While grading papers may make some teachers metaphorically sick, I wonder if grading papers makes teachers literally sick due to germ and virus transmission.  I'm being serious!

I saw a post the other day on social media about the 23 things you'll understand when dating a teacher and thought back to the years when I started teaching and was sick with bronchitis, pneumonia, and strep or the years when my husband and I first started dating, and he was constantly coming down with something. Granted our immunity has improved over the course of my 17-year career, but in the past three years of bringing Chromebooks into the classroom and flipping my assessment techniques, I've seen a decrease in the frequency with which I've contracted an illness.

Less-Paper Assessment
So what am I doing differently with assessment?  How am I going paperless?  I still give my students papers (ask them about Baker's infamous packets), but the key is I don't collect them to assess them.  Since flipping my classroom, I am freed from the spotlight of the stage at the front of the room.  Structuring the period with student-centered learning activities, I can walk from desk to desk, ask students to show me their paper to read, ask them to flip the page over so I can continue reading, and then make quick marks and provide verbal feedback with my pen, never laying my actual finger on the paper. Plus, by speaking directly to the student face to face, the student has the opportunity to ask questions immediately.  I was always so frustrated when students would give a cursory glance to the comments I spent hours making on their papers back in the days I collected, scored, and redistributed their work.

Using Edmodo and Google Classroom, students are turning in their work electronically.  From submitting links to Edmodo discussion posts to turning in typed outlines on Google Docs, my students are generating an informal online portfolio of the work that can be accessed at anytime with a mobile device or computer.  Assignments are never misplaced in the bottom of a bookbag or lost after a folder has exploded in a crowded hall.

It has taken me a bit of trial and error, as well as help from online colleagues to figure out the most efficient ways to score online assignments.  Pairing Google Classroom assignments with the Doctopus and Goobric Add-ons seems to be the most efficient system I've come across:  few clicks to make, links and scores organized on a spreadsheet, rubrics pasted in to the Google Doc, scores emailed to students. I had tried out Doctopus prior to Google Classroom and it just didn't work for me, but NOW... holy moly guacamole!

Doctopus & Goobric Set-Up

1. Create your rubric for an assignment on a Google Sheet.  The first column will be the focus areas of your rubric, while the first row will be for numeric values.  Type in your qualities for each focus area and score.                                                                                                   
2. On a new, blank Google Sheet, go to the Add-on menu and select Get Add-ons, then locate Doctopus.                                                                                                                       
3. Open Doctopus and follow the directions in the side panel, selecting "Ingest Google Classroom Assignment,"  then selecting your Classroom Class and Assignment, and then attaching a Goobric (your rubric that you made in Google Sheets).  The add-on will fill in all the information on the Google Sheet, listing students' names, email addresses, links to the scoring screen, and the student documents, as well as scores as you enter them in on the scoring sheet. I've purposely hidden student names and email addresses on the screenshot below.  You will need to enter in the SUM or similar formula to calculate the total scores in the Grade column. For those of you who do proficiency based scoring, you can use conditional formatting to color-code the scores in the spreadsheet (which I didn't do in this screenshot below).
4. To score student work, click on the hyperlink in the Goobric Link column and the scoring screen will appear in a new tab.  
5. On the scoring screen, you can see the rubric for entering scores, a dashboard for submitting and advancing to the next student, and the student's document where you can enter in comments as needed.                                                                                       
6. After scores are submitted, the spreadsheet automatically updates and you can set it so that students are sent an email with the scores and the rubric is pasted at the bottom of the Doc with the appropriate cells highlighted to signify the scores.                      

So why do I like this system?  Well, after set-up, scoring takes place on one screen, and I have minimal clicking to get through the class set and students are immediately sent their scores.

If you'd like more information on setting up Doctopus and Goobric, take a look at this public Google Doc and make sure you send a thank you tweet to Andrew Stillman, the mastermind of Doctopus and Goobric.

Snow Day Papers
So here I am at home on a snow day, happily blogging.  But, I've also found another reason for going paperless.  Remember those department-mandated Quarterly Exams I collected on Monday?  Guess where they are sitting right now.  Yup, that's right... on my desk at school.

After being out on Tuesday and Wednesday, I was busy catching up on all the things from being absent and left them on my desk, thinking I will get to them on Friday.  Well, it looks that groundhog was wrong and the weather-folks underestimated this "brush" of a snow storm because here I am sitting home on a snow day without my stack of papers to grade.  Guess I'll have some catching up to do again....

#ISTE2015 Peer Evaluation & a BAM Radio Interview

So, this happened.....  Jon Bergmann, flipclass pioneer, interviewed me about my peer evaluation techniques at ISTE.

How did that happen???  Well, after chatting about what I do during lunch with Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams, and Crystal Kirch, Jon says, "I need to interview you right now for my radio show!"  Say, what?!  I didn't even have time to process his statement.  Next thing I know, Jon finds a quiet spot, whips out his phone and starts recording and asking me questions. You can listen to the podcast of the interview with Jon Bergmann here.

That was on Sunday. On Tuesday, I presented my ISTE session, "Best Practices & Digital Tools for Feedback, Assessment, & Evaluation," to a packed room. No open seats and folks were even sitting on the floor!

@KtBkr4 getting people excited about assessing students @ISTE_OLNetwork #edtech #ISTE2015 pic.twitter.com/yz6exA52Ca

— Ryan Hudson (@hudson524) June 30, 2015

#ISTE2015 Nice job @KtBkr4 sharing a great set of feedback, evaluation & assessment tools pic.twitter.com/Q24ngLjZLA

— Jon K Price (@JonKPriceIntel) June 30, 2015

To learn how/why I got started with peer evaluation, read this.


Since my student teaching days, I've been refining my peer evaluation process, and with Google Apps for Education, the process has become paperless. Google Classroom makes it easy to manage the workflow. Keep in mind, the following steps take place over the course of a week or so. Students get their writing evaluated by classmates, and then the writers evaluate their evaluators. The objectives of this process are centered on fostering a community of writers and having a dialogue about student work. Students are engaging in an analytical, reflective, and metacognitive process.


GOOGLE CLASSROOM STEPS:

1. Create an assignment in Google Classroom for students to turn in their writing.
2. Create a Google Form for the peer evaluation.  I use a combination of rubrics: checklist of requirements, numerical qualities, and Outstanding/Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory (OSU) to assess quality. 
3. Share the writing pieces with the class. Classroom will automatically put all student work in to an assignment folder which you can share with the class. I prefer to set the permissions to "Anyone with link can COMMENT." When you change the folder settings, it will change every document in the folder to match the sharing permissions of the folder. 
4. Create an announcement where you provide the link to the shared folder and the Google Form for evaluation. Students open folder, select essays to read and evaluate on the Google Form. I encourage students to do at least 5 different evaluations. 
5. Create another Classroom assignment for analyzing the evaluations. I create a template Google Doc with guiding questions and have Classroom create a copy for each student and I attach the master spreadsheet for the students to copy/paste their particular data. Students analyze their data and agree/disagree with the itemized evaluations as well as the whole evaluation. They must provide evidence to support their agreement/disagreement with the evaluations. 
6. Create another Google Form for the Evaluation of the Evaluator.  Writers will fill out the form providing their evaluator with feedback on the quality of the evaluation. I've also used the Autocrat add-on to auto deliver the feedback to a Google Doc for each evaluator instead of doing the next step. 
7. Create another Classroom assignment for analyzing the evaluation of the evaluator with another Google Doc template (again set it so Classroom generates a copy for each student to edit) and the link to the spreadsheet attached. Students copy/paste their corresponding data on to their Google Doc and analyze/reflect on how well they evaluated their classmates.

Throughout this entire process, I am monitoring the students and checking the spreadsheets.  If I see something out of joint (someone isn't pulling his/her weight), I will speak directly to the student and provide redirection.  Students are also allowed to talk to one another while working on the evaluations. I keep an ear on the conversations and will jump in as needed.

So I know this process is an overwhelming amount to digest at once.  I do not do all of this right away.  I scaffold the process and gradually ease students into this. Here is my instructional design:

Marking period 1: Foster an open community by getting students accustomed to sharing their work.  Everything from worksheets to quick writes is shared with a neighbor.  I also have students post their finished work to our Share Our Work small group and Scribe City group in Edmodo (more on the Edmodo groups in another blog post).  We do quick peer evaluation activities on paper to start and by the end of the marking period use Google Forms. We have discussions on how to evaluate each other's work with students writing self-evaluations. No formal evaluations of the evaluator just yet.

Marking period 2: We maintain our open community, but the writing tasks and peer evaluations have increased in complexity and length. We no longer use paper to evaluate, everything is on Google forms.  Students still complete self-evaluations and begin to use Google Forms to evaluate the evaluator.

Marking period 3: Pull it all together!  Students engage in the entire process completing formal evaluations of writing tasks and the evaluators. Everything is on Google Forms and in Classroom.

Marking period 4: Continue. Continue. Continue.  As a final project, students write up a final self-reflection as a writer and evaluator examining their growth through out the entire year.

So that is it in a nutshell.  Did I lose you through all of this?  Need clarification?  PLEASE, share and let me know what you do with your students.  I am continually tweaking this process, so I value your contributions!