Paperless Grading: A Saga

I thought to myself "How hard can it be, to go paperless?  Or at least decrease paper in the classroom?  Easy peasy."

Ha. Hahahah.  Ha.

So, let's go with the pros.  It gives my students way more autonomy and access to materials.  Worksheet with a video embedded?  Yes please.  Neat tools that are super fun to access?  Don't mind if I do.  Interactive rubrics?  With a side of documents to be organized by a neat system.  In theory, I should be streamlined more than a slick shaved swimmer.  In theory.

But there is something to be said about the ticking time bomb that is a hard copy to a thing.  It is much easier to have one physical object to represent a student.  Then it gives you a hard timeline because you want that thing out of of your face.  Without a thing in my face, I find it very difficult to get things done.  What I used to get back to students quickly for feedback can now take up to a month or more.  Occasionally, I will also have multiple assignments pile up on me and that can be entirely overwhelming.It's much more satisfying to decrease a pile than to fill in a spreadsheet.  It became hard to feel like I had accomplished anything.

On the other hand, not having a pile of papers lets me keep my desk and classroom so much less cluttered with extra mess.  Without hard copies of their projects, I don't have student work to put on the walls.  Therefore, I only have nice science posters to post.  Kind of nice and pretty really.

There are also a lot of programs to help expedite the grading process, like Doctopus and Goobric, which are now communicating much better with Google Classroom.  And Google Classroom now communicates with our grading system, School Loop, so now grades (more or less) automatically fill in the gradebook on School Loop from Google Classroom.

While I feel like I'm getting the hang of the system as it exists, there are many modifications I would love to see.  I would love for group projects to be easier to assign, grade and enter.  On the developer side, I would love for the connection between School Loop and Google Classroom to be less glitchy.  On my side of things, I want to make more webquests and autonomous discovery based assignments.  I want to do things faster and better.  So, off to a good start.  I just want things to keep going.

Delayed Reaction

This is part one of a two day, two part post.  I'm doing them separately because I feel like that's more true to the project.

Day 6-

So today was a long day.  I decided to stay all the way to 6th period, partly because I really wanted to practice some delivery stuff, partly because I love those kids.  So, 6th is the higher English speakers, and I've connected really well with a couple of the kids.  They're the ones who actually say "Hi" to me in the hallways.  The part of today's class I helped lead was the discussion of class expectations, which went as well as that sort of thing ever does.  We had kids translate it into their home language to help others in the class whose language skills are still developing.  In 5th period, they were awesome about it and so quick to jump right into it.  Their posters, which were a pretty open assignment, looked fantastic, if a bit unfinished.  I don't know why, but I'm always impressed by how students just jump into open activities like that.  I was for sure a structure kid.  

This is a little backwards, because now I'm going to talk about the morning.  I came in, indulged in my latest addiction (COFFEE) and a young woman came in after me.  She's in the AP morning class and we just started talking.  I love talking to the seniors, because of that weird feeling that they think they're so adult, and I remember thinking the exact same way, but life is just beginning.  These kids have seen so much already, and it's just the beginning.  Kind of a fantastic dichotomy.