This year with the introduction of google apps, a tremendous opportunity to improve feedback on students lab reports presented itself with scripts written by
+Andrew Stillman. In the past, I would have had huge stacks of paper labs that I had to wade through, transport and store. In cleaning up this work flow nightmare, I've used two scripts creatively. They are
Doctopus and
sheetSpider.
Improving Feedback
What this mechanism allows me to accomplish is provide meaningful feedback initially through the doctopus email feature once the "grading" is completed initially. I put quotes around grading because I am now using standards based grading for these formative assessments which means that students edit and revise their labs based on my comments directly in their lab document. Once they have successfully demonstrated proficiency on an assignment, I can update their level then as shown in the video above, push these updates out to a summary spreadsheet in their drive where I keep a running log of their proficiency levels. This way, students can take more ownership of their progress and don't have to wait to see their teacher to know their progress levels or look into their individual assignments. This set up is a far cry from how it used to be, but thats the explosive growth I've seen combining google apps and scripts.
