Now why didn't I think of that earlier ...

[robinturner]

I've just realised that now I have a decent monitor, I can actually have two documents side by side on the screen, with readable text and enough of it in the window not to have to scroll down after every paragraph. This makes grading different versions of student papers so much easier - I don't have to keep switching windows to see what they've done with my comments and corrections.

Yes, that's Zhang Ziyi peeping out from between the essays on epistemology and The Matrix.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

This is with electronic submission. This is my first experiment with the "paperless classroom" since I tried it at a summer school about four years ago, when it was a royal pain, largely because my students couldn't handle basic things like "Save As" and attaching documents.

It's worked much better this time. Even within a few years, students' basic computer skills have improved greatly (though I still get a few essays where the author has hit Return at the end of each line!), I have a facility for them to upload essays via the course web page, and, most importantly, I've written macros to facilitate my most commonly used codes and comments.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Sounds pretty smooth. Classrooms are starting to go paperless, here, too (but prolly for an entirely different reason--budget cuts have made copying and printing a prohibited luxury; part of prof prestige is unlimited copying). But profs have a cheat: a site called turnitin.com. Apparently this site will check a paper for plagiarism, returning a list of sources in context and with proper citation that are found in the paper--and the profs can set the sensitivity to varying levels, I believe. I had my first Internet class... five or six years ago, I think six b/c it was the summer before my senior year. Things have come a long way since then. I find it difficult to fathom a student these days not knowing how to use a computer--they've permeated American society so much that even kids in the lowest income families have generally been exposed to computers enough to do basic word processing--but it does happen.

Do you think its easier to comment electronically or hc?

I used to write my papers hc, and then retype them. That was when I was in elementary school, though, and since then I've come to completely compose directly on the computer. In fact, writing papers hc are more difficult, now, b/c I'm so used to the keyboard rhythm and the changeability of the text for easy edits as I write. Apparently this problem isn't unique, since discussion in universities here about allowing test essays to be written on laptops is gathering force. I still like to do some major overhauls hc, though, esp w/more complicated subject matter. I guess my brain still needs the tactile inputs to deal w/and organize the information most efficiently.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I checked out turnitin.com, but was put off by the fact that they're charging for what is essentially a very simple service. There used to be a free site called "howoriginal.com" but when I looked, it had been replaced by an art gallery, unless I've misremembered the name. Essentially all you need to do is submit sentences to a search engine (which I frequently do manually) with a certain allowance for bad fit. Maybe I'll write something along those lines in the holidays- I was thinking of doing this to query our student writing corpus in any case (i.e. checking for recycled essays).

I'm still not sure whether marking on the computer is quicker than doing it by hand - a lot depends on your typing vs. handwriting skills. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing it without setting up your WP for that purpose - my toolbar is bristling with buttons with names like "Gr", "Sp", "Style" etc. (my favourite is "Fatal", which underl,nes text and highlights it in bright red, for really bad mistakes!). What I've found is not that I read papers more quickly, but I'm more likely to get round to reading them (since they're already there on my computer, rather than waiting in an ominous stack) and I tend to give more detailed feedback.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

HaHa... "Fatal" sounds like it could be fun. A lot of English and humanities (esp social sciences) profs use green-inked pens for correction, now. As one of my profs described it, getting a paper back w/a bunch of red marks all over it was always a little mortifying, as if his prof had gone through stabbing the life out of his work. That prof was also an idiot, though, so I didn't take anything he said too seriously. I only really gave it full creedence when another prof said he used green b/c it was less intimidating for students, compared w/the typical red--but still more visible than black or blue. I still use red, though--I like to think of it as bionic modification. :-P

When you grade style, do you go by British or by American conventions for English? or do you get papers in Turkish?

[solri.livejournal.com]

I don't mind if students use American or British English, so long as they are consistent.

The green/red thing makes sense, which is why I reserve red for really serious errors, like subject-verb disagreement. Style errors are in green, grammar in blue and spelling in yellow.