Blog Post 2 - PBL Grading Tools

Thoughts on the search for an efficient PBL grading tool, and some thoughts on using LMS systems in a PBL classroom.

Rubric-based grading is hard. It’s especially hard when you’re grading 100’s to literally 1,000’s of items by a rubric. I’m still amazed at the lack of a tool that can do such a thing. Surely, I’m not the only person who could use this, but so far, my search has been fruitless to the point of me trying to build my own over the past few months.

There are plenty of gradebook programs out there. We have PowerSchool, which is pretty terrible by most people’s accounts. It’s inefficient, buggy, pretty much a pain to use. But gradebook programs are not what I’m looking for. I’m talking about an actual tool I can grade with. I’m talking about a customizable rubric you could literally use to grade assignments with. One of the difficulties I’ve found with PBL is the grading. In my classes in particular, I get absolutely buried under mountains of completed assignments, because basically 100% of their work results in deliverables. What if I could create a customized program with all of my criteria built into the program, and I could simply go through and check off what’s been achieved and what still needs work, then assign a grade, and then submit that grade plus meaningful feedback to the student? What if instead of having to use multiple programs and go through multiple steps, there was an all-in-one solution? Oh, and how about some PowerSchool integration? Few things I find more infuriating than have to use one program (or…more than one program) to grade with, only be stuck with data entry at the end. It complicates the process, slows it down, and opens up more opportunities for human error (think data entry).  

For me, this project has gotten me closer to the “holy grail” of grading for my projects, a GUI (graphical user interface), that will allow me to quickly grade my students’ work via a rubric. I grade their work via a rubric in my head all the time, but this allows me to give quicker, more focused feedback than on paper. One of the big downsides to this system is that for it to be efficient, two monitors are required. You can do it with one, but switching back and for between minimized windows slows me down. With two, I can have their pictures up on one (my color-calibrated monitor...so their pictures are more accurately displayed) and have the rubric on the other. After filling the rubric out, I take a screenshot of it (using the built-in Windows Snipping Tool), and use the snipping tool’s built-in highlighter to mark the areas where each image needs to be improved. Finally, I copy and paste that screenshot into an email I send the student through Google Classroom when returning their grade. The email also gives me a chance to give them more detailed feedback when required. Here’s an example.

The thing that’s baffling about all of this is that so far, I have been unable to find anything like it online, free or otherwise. To me, it seems like a great idea. Build a rubric, then actually use it (not use it in the sense that I look at it and grade from there), but really USE it to grade with. That seems like a no-brainer. Yet, there’s nothing. This is an area where grading could really be streamlined. Think about being able to give valuable feedback and do grades, all at the same time, with only a few clicks. One of the reasons I moved away from itsLearning was how it was creating more and more work for me, instead of simplifying my life (which is one of their selling points).

Speaking of learning management software, this semester I’ve moved from our paid itsLearning LMS to Google Classroom. After itsLearning put a mysterious cap on how much student work I could download at a time (that cap being somewhere between 50 and 100MB of data) for no apparent reason, and after having dealt with their customer support for a weeks, I finally decided to find a better way to “take up” their work digitally. Google Classroom allows me to download an entire class’s worth of work in a minute or two as opposed to 30-60 minutes (or sometimes more) for single class.

However, Google Classroom still has a lot of room for improvement. For example, if I want to divide students into groups, there’s no way for me to separate them (e.g. by block). I have to create a new “classroom” to do that. As far as I can tell, “on time” or “late” are the only indicators of when a student turned in an assignment. A time and date would be helpful. There’s no good way for me to create one assignment and then send it to multiple classes, and there’s no way for to modify the date on a single assignment shared between classes. Often times I will have small, quick assignments, which all levels of my classes have to do. I have to create that assignment 4 times, instead of only 1 and copying it (and updating any changes) to each class. These are simply changes to the program I think would go a long way in making is functionality much better, and hopefully Google actually looks at the feedback they get.