This past calendar year, I have been working to improve my grading and assessment processes. I want to make these processes transparent, streamlined, and provides students with information they can use to grow. The first part of this process was move to an electronic only grading system. This meant using my district’s LMS and electronic grade book exclusively for accepting student work, grading/assessing and giving students/parents feedback. This lead me to change some of my grading policies such as a new concept of how late work would work and what feedback for students would look like. The feedback was one of the areas that I wanted to make significant changes to, way in the past I had given students specific written feedback on all assignments. This process however took a lot of time, I began searching for methods of how to speed up this process and found several ways that worked. Most of this would be in the form of using pre-made statements that were organized and could just be copy and pasted into the notes/comment section of the LMS. 

The Process

However a major area was lacking was when it came to drawings and other visual forms where students needed feedback on specific areas location on the assignment. In our LMS we have the ability to draw on assignments, I paired this with adding a text box with a number in it. My thinking with this is a tying a location on the document to a number that was then paired up with the text feedback. This worked well in the concept, but trying to draw and make notations with the mouse was unwieldy and cumbersome at best. Which lead me to look for different methods to draw on the screen. As I was watching some digital art videos on YouTube, I saw them using drawing tablets and thought if I could find an inexpensive drawing tablet that would be the ideal way to complete this task. While switching back and forth between a keyboard, mouse and the drawing tablet can be a little clunky at times, the quality of feedback I can now give my students is excellent. Most of the time once I am in the grading tool I don’t use the mouse and use the drawing tablet for mouse actions and movement. I found several inexpensive drawing tablets on Amazon for under $50, while this is an extra expense it is a one time cost as I have now been using this tablet for a year now and it is holding up very well.

I think that adding as many tools to our digital toolset I think is better as it allows us to be more flexible and adaptable to the different situations that we encounter in the classroom. By adding more visual information to my feedback cycle, I am able to better direct students to the changes that they need to make in order to improve assignments. This leads them to being more self-directed in their work and learning processes. When we can empower and give students better and varied routes to improve their learning students and teachers become more effective in the learning process.

Take Away

After a couple of weeks of adding this new type of feedback, I saw considerable improvements in work by the majority of my students. While some students never looked at the feedback and took the initial grades they got, I think this will always been expected in a percentage of students no matter the what kinds of supports are put into place. While adding this kind of written specific feedback with the drawing tablet adds a bit of  time to my grading process, I think that the benefits of the feedback of worth the time that it takes. As I have gone through the process more I have found ways to reuse pieces of written feedback as well. I hope that this has inspired you to you add more feedback to you student assignments.

Some Drawing Tablets I Like