Grmr.me

When I grade, I always link to a relevent website where a motivated student can find help.  This will be a great resource to me in the future!

http://grmr.me/ is a great writing and literature website that explains issues in clear language. It also includes videos and quizzes!

They even have a quick guide with the links for the most common grammar felonies.

How do you use technology to help your students?

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More Rubric Goodness

I told you about Rubistar a couple of weeks ago.  Now I'm here to share the University of Wisconsin's examples.

Go here for some fantastic example rubrics.  I particularly like these examples because they are all detailed, objective, and cover many subject areas.  They draw on lots of other excellent resources as well, so you could spend many hours taking a look at lots and lots of fantastic resources.  Go have a gander!

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RubiStar: Create a Rubric in a Snap!

I'll admit right now that I'd never heard of rubrics until I'd been teaching a few years in a college setting.  Like many people who teach at college level, I had no education background, and the instructors who taught me never used rubrics.  Now that I have been enlightened, I never grade without one.

Grading with a rubric can help speed up grading while keeping feedback consistent and objective. The rubric helps my students know what I am looking for, and helps them understand why they earned the grade that was given.  When I started teaching online, rubrics because even easier to use. It became a matter of clicking boxes and adding my detailed feedback. I have been pleased with the Canvas rubric features.

For those who have never written a rubric before, it can seem overwhelming.  When I first started writing rubrics, I found it stressful.  I never knew how much information to add, how to space out points, or how to make it as objective as possible.  I was so relieved when a friend showed me RubiStar.

RubiStar has been around since 2000, and the website has a very early 2000's internet look to it, but it is a fantastic starting point.  It has an easy to use point and click interface.  All an instructor has to do is answer a few questions, then they are on their way to creating their own custom rubric.  Copy and paste may be used to transfer the rubric over to Canvas once it is done.  Unfortunately, you do need to copy and paste *each* box.  The entire thing cannot be imported at once.  However, once it's done, it never has to be done again.  

For some more information on how to make a rubric using RubiStar, view the video below:

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Recently Canvas has introduced a Notes column in the Gradebook.  To activate the Notes column, go to your Gradebook and select the Gear right above student names. The last item on the list should say 'Show Notes column' The Notes column will appear as the third column, right before the grade columns.

I have already discovered an incredibly useful way to employ this tool. For the final project in AR100 I require students to email their subject about 4 weeks before the project is due. I don't grade this specifically but the submission or lack thereof does affect their final score. Instead of scrounging through my emails for this info, I now record the subject and date of email in the Notes column

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Keep Calm and Just Grade

Muting Assignments

Muting assignments allows instructors to grade, regrade, make comments (change and add comments), etc. all without students getting notifications every time you do something.

This heads off student stress about why they received a certain quiz grade when you haven't graded the typed responses yet, a grade (that was mistakenly given to them),why they haven’t received their grades when classmates have, why they received 2 or more grades for the same assignment (now that you've adjusted it), etc.

It allows instructors to grade discussions as they happen without needing to wait for every post to be submitted, grade quizzes without concern for students sharing answers or getting an inaccurate grade until you finish scoring the text entry questions. You can change grades, make additional comments, adjust class assignment scores, etc., then release them all at once. Just grade as you go, and then “unmute” it when you’re all done. 

How?

There are a couple of ways. The easiest (for me) is in the gradebook. Hover over the assignment title, and you’ll see an arrow in the bottom right of the cell. Click it…and voila! “Mute Assignment” is there. 

Once you mute, a mute icon appears next to the title.

When you’re all finished grading, just go back to the gradebook and unmute it. Unmute will be right where mute was. Enjoy!

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