Technology and the Paper load

I've just finished grading a stack of papers and am thinking to myself that there must be a better way. How can I use technology to effectively teach writing and at the same time reduce my paper load?

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Permalink Reply by Tammy Moore on March 19, 2009 at 6:59am

Writing is a tough one to go with technology assisted grading. Why, even the standardized tests that include writing still have hand-scorers. Nonetheless, there may be some helps out there. I have used Moodle's Wiki and Workshop modules with rubrics to get the kids on board with peer-reviewing. With Workshop the scores that the kids give can automatically go to the gradebook saving you some paperwork time. Some of the collaboarative tools online now may also be retasked for something like this since the kids can mark the compositions in the review cycle. It can lighten your load a bit while also teaching the kids to pay more attention to critical analysis of their own writing (nothing like knowing your peers will be reading it instead of just the teacher).

There is an expensive software out there that I researched about a year ago that will completely computer score written works and the student gets immediate feedback. The cost was a huge drawback and the computer scoring model that they had required that only the specific essay prompts in the software could be used. I cannot even remember the name of the software now because those two drawbacks stopped me in my tracks pretty early on in exploring it.