Efficiencies in Sharing, Collecting & Grading Google Documents

We all know that the big Google buzz this school year has been about Google Classroom. Yet again, Google is doing what it can to help make teacher and student lives easier. With Google Classroom, Google has made it easy for teachers to be able to create a course to help elevate headaches of sharing information, documents and due dates with students. Prior to this, some teachers were using Doctopus, Goobric, Google Forms, and/or gClass Folders.

At the beginning of the school year, Google Classroom was still missing the ability for teachers to be able to grade electronically with a rubric. What I mean by this is once a teacher opens up a Google Document to assess, there was no ability to grade with an electronic rubric. (Obviously this will be helpful as schools start moving in the direction of doing things electronically.) Classroom allowed you to enter in a final grade if you wished to report to the student but the student was not able to see why they got what they got.

Andrew Stillman, creator of Doctopus and Goobric, made revisions to his product to allow the script to be integrated with Google Classroom. Why is this important to you you might ask? Well, the best part of using Doctopus (and Goobric) is that the electronic rubric that you assess the student is attached to the bottom of the Google Document. In other words, once you open the student's document, you can attach the rubric right to it. An email is even sent to the student to notify them the results of the rubric. How does this work?

• You create an assign an assignment in Google Classroom. 
• You then create a rubric a specific way in Google Sheets (Doctopus gives you those parameters)
• Once the assignments have been collected, you create a blank Google Sheet and open an add-on in a blank Google Sheet called Doctopus
• You follow the steps of Doctopus so that all of your students have the rubric 'assigned' to their document.
• You open up student work and grade using the rubric electronically.
• Once done with grading that one student, rubric is attached to document and email is sent to student.

A couple of weeks ago, the New Hampshire Google Education Group ran a Google Hangout On Air with the major focus of Doctopus and Google Classroom. I asked our very own Jennifer Baney, Physics Teacher at BHS, if she would be willing to join in on the conversation as I knew she was an expert in using these tools. In fact, Baney originally was only going to use Google Classroom with one of her classes until she discovered that Doctopus worked with it. (She has been using Doctopus now for at least a year). Now she is using Google Classroom with all of her classes.

To view this Google Hangout, click HERE.

**Doctopus Conversation starts 28 minutes into the Hangout**

**Please note that this was NH GEG first Hangout On Air - so it will not be polished.**

In the Hangout Jennifer Lowton (@jllowton) gives an explanation of Doctopus and how it can be used outside of Google Classroom for those teachers who have not used Classroom or do not plan on using it. Jennifer Baney gives more explanation of how she uses it with Google Classroom as well as provides insight of how she creates documents to push out to students. Some ideas that she recommends to teachers (and I would second these suggestions):

• When creating a document for students, provide space that you want them to type in. Maybe change the color and/or font so that when they start typing in that spot it looks different from your instructions on the document. This will be easier for you when you are grading electronically.
• Another way to help break up your instructions and student work is to create tables where you want students to type so that it will show up in a 'text box'.
• When you want students to be able to annotate pictures/images/graphs, please those images in a drawing right in a Google Doc. By doing this, students would double click on an drawing so that they can 'annotate' it.

Jennifer Baney has been very creative in how she uses Google Documents with her Physics students and I commend her on that! If you have any questions on using Google Classroom and/or Doctopus with your courses, you know where to find me.