Glog grading
When you want to assign students a glog creating project through GlosterEDU, here are my suggestions for making it easier:
- Always assign the project using GlogsterEDU’s “assign project” option. This way you can easily see who has completed the assignment who has not, and you can post grades and comments that are sent privately to students as messages, but you can see whenever you check the glog or the project list that is made once you’ve assigned a project to students. When students decide to “make their own” (even though they can alter your template how ever they want), there is no option for adding a grade, and it looks like they didn’t do the assignment, so do everything you can to discourage that.
- Making a good template is even better than writing a good assignment on paper. You can suggest what goes where, and students can replace as needed. Hint for foreign language teacher friends: be sure to set all fonts to Arial (latin all) on templates so accents can show up.
- For grading, I suggest making a rubric that you can copy and paste descriptions from, either adding number out of (e.g. 8/10) or with a thorough description for each level. This way you can give quick, easy feedback that I’d say is even more understandable than a grid or other checklist. Also, this makes it easy for you and for students to access and keep track of why they got the grades they got on the assignments.
During the process of grading, you might end up having to save your changes many times. It’s one of the things I would like to see glogster streamline. However, you can take care of everything in three steps and minimize re-saving:
- Open the glog and, on the left side of the screen, check the class to add the glog to the class you want it in (for easy access later, examples and all, you know) AND click Public for all, so that it can be accessed for commenting by others in the same classes. Click Submit changes at the bottom left.
- Then copy and paste your rubric to the Comment section, put the total under Grade, and click Submit on the right side. Be sure to transfer this grade to your gradebook before the next step, though.
- Click Add to student’s portfolio. This finalizes the project and makes it uneditable for the student (unless you take it back out of the portfolio). It also, for some reason beyond me, removes the glog from your project assignment page. (Hence the putting in the gradebook before this step.)
Glogs make it possible for students to blend media, something especially crucial in foreign language classes. There are pretty cool things you can do with a teacher account, too, but there are still a few things I would wish for (though they did finally roll out auto-saving!)
- Don’t take projects off the project assignment page even when they’re in portfolios!
- Make it so we can add the glog to a class, make it public, add it to portfolios, AND submit grades with just one submit button.
- Add a button for navigating back to the project assignment page directly after grading a glog.
- Add a grade spreadsheet page like Edmodo has, so you can see scores for all assignments.
