Marking assignments electronically

Continuing with the theme of assessment and evaluation,  I thought I'd go off on a small tangent and explore two options for marking assignments that are submitted electronically. These could be useful in f2f as well as online courses. I will be trying electronic submission with all of my students this fall, instead of just in my online courses. I like the idea of paperless assignments!

You can use a Tablet to grade papers - this allows you to "hand-write" your comments on the screen. This is more like the experience of grading papers that anyone over a certain age is used to - it retains that "natural" feel that some instructors don't want to give up. However, the tablet is one more thing to carry around (although you could trade your PC for a tablet PC). You might also suffer from very bad handwriting - and your handwriting might even be slower than typing. So the tablet has pro's and con's.

Another option for marking assignments that are emailed as documents created in Word, is to use Word's Review feature to make comments, like this:

If you click on the Track Changes icon, commenting is even easier - just double-click where you want to change something and type:

One potential problem with Tracking Changes is that if you email the Word document back to your student with your changes, they can then "Accept" all of the changes without physically having to make the changes themselves - not a teachable moment. A better option is to save your graded file as a PDF, and email that back to the student, who can then make the changes in their Word file. PDF also means that the student should not have any compatibility issues if you use a different version of Word for example.

I recently learned about a new tool that looks like a great time-saver for grading in Word: Phrase Express. PhraseExpress allows you to create shortcuts for common phrases that you use frequently, thereby automating the grading somewhat. For example, if you often use the phrase "singular-plural confusion", you could create a shortcut, like, #sp, and whenever you type the shortcut, the entire phrase appears. You can also use PhraseExpress to automate the opening of files, folders, websites, and programs. And it's free. This is something I will definitely take an hour or two to explore further as it looks like a practical and useful program.