Click the image to watch a video showing ways of using some of the standard items from the Add a resource/Add an activity drop down menus.
Ok so you’ve taken the plunge – you’ve set up an assignment – the students have uploaded their work – now how do you mark it?
In an ideal Moodle world, all your sets will have been uploaded for you and enrolled on your course and you will just have to click on ‘view …submitted assignments‘ and a list of the students in your class will appear, alphabetically, waiting for you to mark their efforts.
Unfortunately in the real world, if there hasn’t been a school-wide policy, students will have enrolled themselves into your course – maybe coming from different classes – and they will all be lumped together on your gradebook page. Never mind – we can still mark their work, but next blog will show how better to organise your groups in order to filter through just the students you need.
Also in our Perfect Moodle world, the grade you would like to use for your assignment, be it a letter A-G, a level 4-7 or a comment – well done- unsatisfactory etc – will have been set for you in advance. If not, Moodle will have decided for you that your work will be marked out of a hundred. If this isn’t what you would like, then the next blog will explain setting your own grades. Stay tuned!
So..we click on the assigment and click on View Submitted Assignments. This brings us to the gradebook page. Normally, you will have six columns – from left to right: the student’s name, space for your grade, your comment, the location and date of their work, a space to show the date you marked it, and a status column. This is what you click on to type in your appraisal of the student’s upload. If you tick the box at the bottom of the gradebook page ‘allow quick grading’ and save your preferences, you then have the option if you want of moving quickly down the list, choosing a grade and typing in a short comment.
Here is a quick screencast of the very basics of Moodle Marking. It’s done in Wink – ok, not as swish as Captivate – but it’s free! Click the image to have a look.
If Level 1 moodling is being able to upload worksheets and level 2 moodling is being able to type said sheet directly onto a webpage within moodle, then level 3 must be the ability to create an assignment – put simply, an online worksheet linked to the gradebook. Assignments can be located in the ‘add an activity’ section and there are four types – although one of them, the ‘offline assignment’ is something of a cheat because there is no task attached; it just offers an area to add marks for something done outside of Moodle. Of the others, the one most frequently used at Our Lady’s is the ‘upload a single file’.
Pupils are presented with a page of instructions – this can be in the form of a webquest with hyperlinks to sites specially chosen by their teacher, or it can simply contain copies of tasks done in class. The student works his/her way through the activities and then produces a piece of work which they then upload via the box at the bottom of the screen. An excellent way of ensuring everyone has completed the work in time for the bell is to bring up the gradebook in the last five minutes of the lesson and watch the work arrive – students will ask you to refresh the page to prove they’ve sent theirs and are allowed to go! The third type of assignment is an online text.
This presents the student with a text box into which they type their work directly, rather than leaving Moodle to go to Word/PowerPoint and then returning later. This is quicker for a teacher to mark as it requires just one click to open up and view the text, rather than having to deal with uploaded documents – open? save?- time-consuming choice when there are 32 in a class! The fourth type of assignment, advanced uploading of files, allows for students to send in more than one piece of work – useful if they are doing GCSE coursework for instance, or any project requiring a number of items. Hint: learn how to use ‘groups’ ; it will make the marking far easier when you can filter the students to be left with your own class. How to mark in Moodle? That’s for another time…
I was going to paraphrase Sue Cowley and call this ‘getting the buggers to Moodle’ but this would seem to suggest an inherent unwillingness on the part of students to use Moodle – and I don’t believe this to be the case. Moodle mirrors so many of their out of school experiences already – they communicate via IM or forums (chat); they will upload images to their Myspace/Bebo; they will send attachments in their email; they will do online quizzes for fun and get instant feedback… the challenge then, is to integrate Moodle into their online lives such that they access it, like MSN or Bebo, without a second thought. And they won’t do that if they think it’s just another means of making them do boring homeworks. Some suggestions….
Nothing complex or fancy – just ten suggestions for Good Practice when starting out in Moodle.