Over the last year I’ve been getting the students to PDF copies of their work into a shared folder for marking. There are 2 reasons for this, firstly it avoids printing (kids getting up and crowding around the printer, wasted paper & ink, someone blocking the printer by printing 50 pages, people not putting their name on their work, everyone waiting until the last minute to print and the printer not being able to cope, having to write down the number of pages printed so the IT support can allocate cost because they can’t manage to monitor it using software). Secondly its good preparation for DIDA or any other course which uses eportfolios.
I set up a page in my excel mark book in first name order and sit and mark the work.
The problem I haven’t cracked yet is how to feed back to the kids. Even if I mark at school where I have Adobe Acrobat Professional which allows me to write comments on the work, its a very time consuming process and then its painful to get the kids to return to the shared folders and open their work again. I don’t know if this is lack of effort on my part or if the PDF route is actually inferior to paper.
What has happened this year is that kids submit their work and I mark it and they simply never see it again, so I should get slapped wrists from the AfL police. I’ve not been helped by Adobe Professional disappearing from some school machines. But I really need to work on this marking feedback loop.
