In this video I'd like to share with you how I create a good workflow for
electronic grading. The app that I use is iAnnotate, but you could set this
up with a few changes for other applications as well. Now the first thing
I like to do is I like to give students detailed instructions for how
this process is going to work. I've given you an example here. Feel free to
copy it, but there are three elements that I think are kind of crucial. The
first is to make electronic grading optional if you can, because students
like to have choice and you don't necessarily want to force people who
don't like technology to go through this process (although it's actually fairly
easy). The second thing is that students should provide a proper file name so
that you can clearly identify the file. And the last is that that it would be
great if they can upload it as a PDF. If it's a Word document you can easily
change it into a PDF within iAnnotate, but I think it's easiest obviously
if the student starts off the right way. So those are the instructions, first of
all, for electronic grading. The next step is to go to Dropbox. You need to have a
Dropbox account, which is free, and you need to actually create a file request
every time that you want students to submit something. So we're going to go to
"file request" here. I'm going to request a file and let's just call this "English
101 Essay 2" let's say. Click on "next" and this provides us with a link. I tend
to just copy the link for now. I don't email it right away. And we'll click on
"done." Then I will go to whatever platform I'm using, whether it's Moodle, or
Blackboard, or whatever, and I will email my students the link from there, with a
message as well. They will get the link and when they're ready to upload their
assignment they just click on the link. It will take them to a page that looks
like this and they can see that I'm requesting this file. They get to
choose it from their computer or if they do have a Dropbox account (which they
don't have to have) they can take it from there.
Now let's just do this as a drag-and-drop thing. So I already
have a file ready here. Okay, so I'm going to take my file here, as
you can see, and I'm just going to drag it over there.
And there it is! Press "upload." Make sure students don't forget that step. And
there we go. It's done. So if we go back to our Dropbox account and we click on
this there is our first submission -- ten seconds ago. You can see that for the
student this is very easy. It's just a couple of clicks and uploading usually
doesn't cause any trouble for students. The next few steps we will have to do on
our iPad. What you can see here is that we have Dropbox available now and
if we click on it then we're going to go to "file requests" and we're going to open
our document. I'm not going to go through all the different things that
are available in iAnnotate. I'll cover that in a different video, but I will
mention a couple of things here that you may want to set up ahead of time. One of
these is "stamps." You can click on stamps and you can create custom preset
stamps. So if we want to use a stamp we just click anywhere and you can see I've
got a bunch of stamps set up. There are preset ones as well, [and] you may find
these colorful, but maybe less useful. Okay, those are stamps. Another thing
that we want to set up is our email settings. Let's just go out of here
for now ... To set up our email settings we actually need to just go back to the
main panel, and we're gonna click here on the top right button, which allows us to
look at our settings. We're going to click on app settings and that is actually
going to take us to our regular settings. You can access this here as well
if you just go to your regular settings and you click on iAnnotate. You can see
it here. It's going to take you to the same place. Now in this case what we want
to do is click on sharing, and this is where we can create a default email
subject and email message. I think this is really useful because that way
when you send your marked assignment back you don't have to keep typing out
the same thing. Now I'm going to actually go back to iAnnotate here and show you what
that looks like once we have our essay marked. And I've added this little
message icon here and the message icon allows you to send an email directly to
the student from in iAnnotate. All you would have to do is just add their
email address and you can see that I've written everything out ahead of time so
that every time I send a message back it's going to be the same for every
student. The message isn't personalized but
that would take a long time to to do. Okay, so use this
message tool because the regular message function in iAnnotate has recently been
causing some trouble. So just make sure you add that tool. Now to do that ...
I'm going to delete the draft here ... to add that tool go to the toolbox and
you can drag and drop different things to your toolbar. So under "document" you're
going to see "email." That's one of the options. Now I've already added it, but if
I wanted to add a tool ... let's say I take the second one and I want to add it ... I
can just drag and drop it all the way to my toolbar. I would recommend
that you do that -- that you set up a custom message for emailing back
documents. And that can be tremendously helpful for for making the process
really quick and easy. The next thing we need to do is we need to set up
a mic, because I like to provide audio commentary when I do electronic
grading, and so it's good to have a mic available. I've used MicPro here, which
is free. I think it maybe needs an upgrade soon, and you can use other ones
as well. I'm going to go to "settings" to make sure
that it's integrated with iAnnotate and so that the integration is proper.
What we need to do here now is we need to go to "privacy." So if we go all the way
up -- we're close to the top -- we're going to click on "privacy"
and then we need to go to our microphone. Let's see if we can find this here.
There it is: microphone. And we need to make sure that we enable both MicPro in
this case and we need to enable iAnnotate. This way iAnnotate can use the
mic. If we go back to iAnnotate we can see that they're synced. Okay, so if
we go down in our settings and we find iAnnotate -- there it is now. You can see
that we do have a mic available. After this we need to make sure that our email
settings are properly set up. We're going to go back up in our settings to
"accounts and passwords" click on Gmail and we need to make sure that our
default account is the right one, because it's going to send from this
account. This is the default account. If you ever have any trouble with sending
documents, it's almost always the case that perhaps you have changed your
password in the meantime or your iPad settings haven't been updated properly.
Those are usually the easiest fixes to do, and those are the ones I would I
would generally try first. That's it for setting up the iPad portion of your
workflow and we'll turn back to the PC to touch on a couple of
final things. One of the things I would recommend is that you make sure that you
have all your student emails imported into your contacts list. If you use
Gmail, for instance, you can go to Google contacts, you can click on "more" >
"import," and then if you have a CSV file (which a lot of institutions provide)
then you can use that special type of Excel file, upload it directly, and you've
got all your student emails in your contacts list. Then when you send
that assignment back to the student, you don't have to type out every single
email address individually, but you can just type a few letters and the right
email address will pop up. That's something that I would recommend. The
final thing I would also add is that it's important to give some
proper instructions in terms of how students need to open the assignment.
You can just double click on the assignment obviously, and open it in a
browser or in any PDF reader, but the one issue is that if you have an audio
recording the audio icon will not show up unless you open the document in Adobe.
So I have Adobe Acrobat Reader here. Students can download this for free and
they just need to know that they have to download it, click on "file" > "open" and make
sure they open it directly from here to make sure that they do it correctly. And
then the audio will show up. I've made a little video about this for my students
and you can do something similar. I'll provide a link to this as well, but just
make sure that your students know that for the audio to show up they have to
make sure they open it in Adobe. Hopefully these tips will give you some
ideas for how to set up your workflow really well. It prevents a lot of
headaches down the road, and it just creates the kind of workflow that
students feel comfortable with and eventually I think they often come to
prefer electronic grading, which is good for everybody I think because
electronic grading -- not only can it be faster but it can actually allow you to
create better feedback.