Educators who have never used electronic grading software often find the leap from pen and paper to digital grading intimidating. If you’ve never done it before, it can be a challenge to jump into this new skill without support.
Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your skills in this area, and there’s never been a better time to do it. In the last year, school closures have affected more than 55 million students in the United States alone. They have forced school districts to adapt to either digital or broadcast-based remote education policies.
Today, we’ll focus on actionable tips that educators can use to improve the accuracy, readability, and utility of their feedback for students. If you’re an experienced educator, you likely already can give good feedback—you just need to figure out how to work within your school’s new grading software.
The fundamentals of good grading
Grading should accurately reflect students’ progress and achievement and clearly and fairly communicating their progress and accomplishments related to the rest of the student body.
The way we grade should also enable teachers to recognize situations where students’ hard work and effort improved their understanding and engagement in the subject matter.
Improving your digital grading
Ultimately, grading should reflect knowledge gained and progress made, regardless of whether an instructor does it on paper or online. Teachers use assessments and grading to celebrate achievements that facilitate the learning process.
Here are some ways to ensure that your digital grading efforts follow the fundamentals of excellent grading. With a little effort, this type of technology can make grading so much easier.
Make it timely
Instructors need to give feedback to students promptly for it to be actionable. When teachers have to collect dozens of papers, sort them, and grade them all by hand, this can take a while.
Thankfully, digital grading software like Crowdmark allows students to submit homework online, converted into an image for teachers to mark up using text, images, or embedded links. This process takes a lot less time than traditional grading, and instructors can complete it on any device.
Grade productivity, not memory
In any classroom situation, teachers should focus on developing assignments that allow students to demonstrate their productivity and knowledge and don’t just evaluate their ability to memorize text or formulas. Within the last several years, there has been a great deal of scholarship on how memorization gets in the way of authentic learning.
When teachers offer various assignments that can all be graded online through Crowdmark, students have a few different opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge. Other opportunities help them showcase how much they’ve learned, not just what they can memorize.
Include multimedia to help correct wrong answers
When they’re marking tests and assignments, teachers should strive to offer their students another learning opportunity by revising their incorrect answers. However, when teachers have to do this multiple times per student, it can slow down the grading process.
When teachers use Crowdmark, they can drag and drop comments from a comment library without rewriting them repeatedly. They can embed multimedia to offer a quick correction using an image, video, or audio file.
How technology like Crowdmark makes digital grading easier
There are many reasons to use digital grading software, especially when students are learning remotely. One of the primary reasons is that it makes accepting assignments and giving feedback quicker and easier for both teachers and students.
With Crowdmark, teachers can accept students’ uploaded assignments, then quickly and easily grade them from anywhere. In addition to making their feedback more readable, doing it through Crowdmark allows them to enrich it with images, links, and more. Crowdmark makes it simpler for the educator and gives the student a chance to try out a new learning style.