Faster, No Math Required Feedback

I am on a quest this semester to make feedback as fast and effortless with the least amount of mathing. I hate trying to math by myself. Give me four numbers and unless they’re all 2, I’ll have a different answer each time I add them up. It’s mind blowing how terrible I am. I’ve pretty much decided that from this point on in my life, I am going to math only with the help of a spreadsheet because it’s just less frustrating for everyone.

In the past, I’ve never used Google Forms as a way to “grade” (give feedback) on student presentations because I couldn’t figure out how to have it automatically add up the points. Then, my friend told me about Form Publisher Add-on. And I thought, how did I not know about this??!!

Form Publisher is a Google Form Add-on that allows you to publish your form entry to a doc or an Google Sheet. (And the Google sheet means no mathing by yourself!) Add-ons are amazing little programs that help you do great stuff in Sheets, Forms, Docs and Slides. In Forms, to get an add on, click on the three dots then choose “Add-ons.” Search for Form Publisher and then click add. To run it, go to the puzzle piece and chose it. (You’ll run it after you set up your form. )

The Why

For as long as I can remember, I have always had intermediate students do a two minute oral exposé once a month or once a chapter. I give them the topic: Research a store, a country, a famous scientist, a problem, present your survey results, etc – you get the idea. When I had my combined level 3 and AP class, I used the topics to help the AP students prepare for AP. (I tricked them and had them preparing even in level 3! They had no idea.) I continued this even with my college classes. Sometimes I have it really structured- sometimes I don’t. This unit for college they doing some reading and comparing and presenting a thesis. The first one was, “Tell me about yourself, your family and friends and what role do they play in your life.” I like it. Students like it. It’s a nice way to have some presentational speaking on a specific topic that goes along with your theme. I needed a paperless way to add up these points.

The Set Up

There are two things to set up for Form Publisher. One is the form and the other is destination document. For my form, I took the student email addresses from my Google Classroom and entered this into the first question. This way I could click on the student and populate the column that Form Publisher would use to share the document. (You won’t see this in the example.) Next, I added the names of all of the students in the class along with my own. I have always had students peer grade for oral exposés. A student would get two reviews: One from me and one from the reviewing student.

The Rubric:

I really like the presentational speaking rubric for AP. It’s easy to follow. It’s clear enough without being too wordy. And I’ve used this for years in the high school as well in my college class. (Note: When I had the combined 3/AP class, I used the same rubric for the 3s. Only “appropriate structures” has a different meaning for level 3 and AP.) I wanted the rubric to add itself up, so I made one question with a number for the points (5,4,3,2,1) and one with the comment for that point value. I wanted them to be side by side, but without fancy coding in your sheet you’ll need to have two questions. I repeated until I had all of the criteria.

The Destination Sheet:

I made a template sheet in Google Sheets. Form Publisher had a pretty picture in their example, so I tried to mimic that idea with relatively little success. Because the destination sheet pulls information from the form, you have to have “markers.” These are marked by << >>. (I don’t know what their English name is, so I refer to them as “French quotation marks.”) These have to match EXACTLY what is on your form questions or it won’t work.

I used a basic formula to have the points add up. Here’s an example of what it looks like for the student. (This was a test one.)

Each time you submit the form, Form Publisher creates a new document (or sheet) and can share it with the student. It’s brilliant! No paper! Instant Feedback! I have a section on mine for the students to do a little reflection after their exposé and after they review their feedback because if you give feedback and you don’t have them do something it’s a waste of your time.

You can make a copy of my form here.

You can make a copy of my destination sheet here.

Form Publisher has its own really easy to follow tutorials here.

Data Validation Saves You Time

I’m always surprised how little teachers use Google Sheets (or Excel) because it has so many features that help make all the little tasks we need to do as teachers less time consuming. One of these is Data Validation.

Data What?

Data validation is a neat little feature that adds a drop down menu to your cell so that you have some pre-set choices. You set the choices. Highlight the cells in which you want the drop down menu to appear, then in the tool bar choose Data>Validation. From there, I generally choose “List of Items” and list what I want my choices to be. (You can also require that the cell be filled in with a number or a certain text, but I never use those.) Click to view a video that walks you through the steps.

Applications for Education

Faster Feedback

When I give an assignment, I have a general idea of all of the items I may need to comment on. For example, I know I want to give at least one positive comment, at least one “work-on” comment and then tell them what to do next. I’ve used data validation to give feedback faster, by setting up data validation with the most common comments I think I’ll use. Then I don’t have to type them in one by one, over and over for each student. It makes the mechanics of giving feedback much faster. I can still type in a unique comment if needed, but I don’t waste time typing in the same thing multiple times. I use a Google Sheets Add-On like Autocrat or FormMule to send or share the feedback with the students with a few clicks.

Story/Sentence Creation

Students who can’t produce their own language just yet, can create stories using data validation. Here’s an example I made with vocabulary from the first hours of French. Click on the image to make your own copy and to see all of the choices. It’s like structured sentence creation.

Student Choice

I use data validation to set the choices for my homework choices sheet. Students click on the arrow and it gives them a list of approved choices. I’ve also used it for Flipgrid review.

Attendance

You probably keep attendance in your classes in your school’s student information system (SIS), but data validation can be a quick way to keep track of attendance for clubs or extra curricular activities or anything else you might need to “check-off” over a period of time.

Grading

I use a spreadsheet to grade my end of unit assessments. I have four columns for each of the four sections. I use data validation to put in the possible scores and then as I’m listening to students or reading what they wrote I use the drop down menu to input their score. I set the spreadsheet up to automatically add up the points. It’s much easier to click as I’m walking around with the iPad listening than to type.

Go ahead, open a Google Sheet and see how Data Validation can save you time!

Creating Individual Peer Review Forms

A colleague asked me to help her come up with a way for students to do peer reviews of projects using Google Forms. The results had to be viewable only by the teacher and the student and all students had to have access to the links to submit the peer reviews for every student in the class. The students also needed to be able to re-use the form. I also added the criteria that the steps had to be easy enough that the average teacher could do it, because the things I found in my research were quite complicated even for me.

There are a significant number of simple steps for this, but it is well worth it if you will be doing a lot of peer review. It will take you about 20 minutes to set up and about 10 minutes per class to have the students create their own forms. You only need to do that 10 minute set up once per year per class. And – once you do the initial set-up, it’ll be ready for next year!

Essentially you create a generic form, force student to make a copy of it, then put then name on it and then submit the link to their now individualized form for others to use.

I have created a Google Doc that will walk you through all of the steps with images and links to copy examples of forms if you don’t want to make your own. I also made a video that walks you through the entire process from both the teacher and student perspective.

Don’t let the number of steps intimidate you. Lots of great things in life have lots of steps – like croissants and tamales and those are totally worth it.

Grade Short Answers in Google Forms

Grading has never been ____.

Yesterday Google quietly announced a new Forms feature that allows you to grade by question and allows for streamlined short answer grading. Now you can create short answer/fill in the blank questions and grade them in Forms itself. You provide an answer key (currently case sensitive) and if the student puts that exact answer, Forms grades it automatically. All other answers can be graded quickly with clicks.

With this new update you can easily add short answer and fill in the blank questions to your Forms quizzes.

Feedback is best when it is ____.

The new forms update also allows for individual feedback for questions and even allows you to post a link and test in your feedback. For example you could link to a video or screencast re-teaching the skill. Alternately if the student showed mastery to a video that would challenge them to do more.

#edublogsclub – Assessment

Student Reflection with Google Sheets

Ok- so I actually started this post in February. February!

What had happened was:

My principal came to me last semester with a copy of John Hattie’s Visible Learning into Action and said that it was a book he wanted all of the instructional coaches to have. I thought it was adorable that he thought that I had time to read the book, but I did try and carried it around in my backpack for months.

What I did get to was that self-reported grades have a huge impact on student achievement and so I set about trying to implement some kind of goal based reflection/portfolio/tracking system. I wanted to have students submit samples, so we could see growth over the course of the semester and on which they would reflect and grade themselves and I could get an idea of where they were.

What I did:

I decided to use Google Sheets and Google Classroom because I thought it would be easy to track and while I know there are many sites out there for portfolios I did not want one. more. login or platform.

I created a Google Sheet called Weekly Reflection and shared it in Google Classroom as the only assignment with the “Weekly Reflection” topic label. Students could find it easily in the Stream by clicking on that. Obviously from the title, I had planned that students would do this at the end of each week, but I quickly realized that once a week was too frequent to show any growth, so it ended up being every 2-3 lessons. In the spreadsheet the students chose either Recap or Writing (I told them what they were doing) and then they evaluated themselves based on the rubric on sheet 2. Lastly, they set a goal and made an action step and turned the sheet in through Google Classroom. They did this several times during the semester.

Here’s a short video that shows how it works. Weekly reflection

Once they had turned it in I went and read or listened and then evaluated them based on the rubric as well. Sometimes these were way off. The very first time I had several students that gave themselves a 7 or 8 and they were writing “je suis mange.” I don’t know if they didn’t read the rubric or if they felt like they “had” to evaluate themselves high. Either way, after the first time their evaluations were closer.

The Google Sheet also has tabs for the language goals to see where they are and what they might do to advance. Someone shared this somewhere and I don’t know who it was, so if it was you, thank you!

Some things I did:

I gave them these assignments with only 10-15 minutes left in class because I wanted to see what they could actually do and not what they could look up or plan. It was pure sneakiness on my part.

Students had a paper rubric to refer to so they didn’t have to go back and forth between tabs because that gets annoying.

In the column labeled “notes” at the end of the sheet and I responded to their goal setting and writing or listening sample.

This was not given a grade. It was purely for reflection purposes. If students didn’t do it, nothing happened except for they didn’t get the benefit of my feedback and comments.

Goal setting language was not part of the Student Learning Outcomes I was given to use, so I had them do the reflection and goal setting in English.

What went well:

Using conditional formatting to color code the numbers was brilliant because their progression was represented visually with color.

Students asked me questions about their writing.

Students wrote some great goals and ones that I would never have guessed for them. They saw weaknesses where I didn’t.

What didn’t go well:

Sometimes students only wrote 2-3 sentences and it was difficult for me to evaluate. In these cases I wrote that they didn’t write enough for me to evaluate. That didn’t happen when I gave a Recap to do.

Students didn’t always write an action to do to achieve their goal. This is my fault because I didn’t give examples and non-examples. Easily fixed next semester.

I didn’t have a system for them to reflect on their previous goal setting. #nexttime

I didn’t give enough time. Honestly, I wish I could have them do this at home, but I was too afraid that the Translators and the Internet would cause too much interference and not give me a true sample.

A note on the rubric:

I used the rubric our district is using from our trainings on performance based assessments with Kara and Megan from Creative Language Class. Why I didn’t have students evaluate themselves as NL, NM, etc. instead of numbers? I can’t really say. I’m sure at the time I did it, it made complete sense. I’m going to leave it.

The semester isn’t quite over yet, so I will ask students their thoughts about the efficacy of the rubric/reflection in their end of the semester survey.

Click here to see the Weekly Reflection Google Sheets. You’ll have to make a copy in order to see the fancy down arrows that will color code once you choose a number. Note: Number 1 has no color.

#edublogsclub – Giving Feedback

Fast Feedback

My new guideline for myself is that I don’t give an assignment for feedback unless I know I can get to reviewing it by the next day. Within two days max. Weekend at the very, very latest.

There’s several ways you can give feedback when you’re using Google Classroom. You can use Goobric (and tutorial video.) You can use the new Google Keep Notepad to add in pre-written comments. (See this brilliant post from Eric Curts at Control Alt Achieve.) You can also just use the regular old comment feature in Google Docs.

Here’s the thing: My Novice Lows aren’t writing enough for me to justify all of the time it would to open each student’s document, click, click and then click to add comments, close, then click and wait for the next student’s document to load. Instead I use the private comment section of Google Classroom.

Use the Preview Button

First, in Google Classroom click on the assignment name and find and open the folder with all of the student work.

Next, select one student’s work and then choose “preview.” (It’s the eyeball.) This will bring up a preview mode where you can click an arrow to go to the next student’s work. The student name will appear in the top left corner.

Now, move your tabs side by side. (I use Tab Resize to do this automatically.) Not quite done though, you may need to make the Google Classroom window slightly bigger so you get the list on the side of all of the students. It’s ok if your windows overlap a bit. Toggle back and forth between the student work and the classroom. When you are ready to add in the private comment click on the student name on the left and type your comment down at the bottom.

The Twist- Video

I knew I was going to be encountering the same errors and the same issues for most of the students, so I wanted to create a general comment with a review video for the students. First, I spent too much time on YouTube looking for something that would work for me, then I got smart and used my Snagit to make a quick review video and explaining to students what I wanted them to do in the rewrite. The video is short. (You can use any screencasting software.) Less than two minutes. In the video I asked them to do some color coding so that I could easily see what changes they made.

Always Have a Rewrite

For assignments that are about improving skills, giving feedback without asking students to do something with it is a waste o’ time.

Upload the Video

Upload your video and share it as “Anyone with the link can view”. Write a general comment and include the link to the video. Mine said “Good start! Watch the video to review -er verbs and then make the appropriate changes before resubmitting. <<copy link to video here>>” . For the 30 students whose work I looked only two didn’t need to review and I gave a different comment. For everyone else, I added in something personal after “Good start.” Click “post” as you finish with each student then click over to the work, click on the arrow on the right in the middle of the page to go to the next student and repeat.

Always Have a Rewrite

Before I returned the work to the students I created a new assignment called #025b and gave directions for resubmitting their work. I always mark rewrite assignments in the with a “b,” so that students can reference the original assignment.