I don’t have classes to meet on Fridays, so in some sense today is the beginning of my Spring Break, but I can’t let myself think of it that way. I have about sixty student essays to grade & I need to make substantial progress on getting my Vietnam course fully on-line for its summer debut. Those two things alone add up to many hours of work, so I’m essentially on eight to ten hour work days over “break.”

I briefly noted a couple of weeks back that I was using Turnitin.com’s Grademark tool. Now that I have had more experience with it, I’m even more impressed than I was initially. It has loads of useful marks preloaded & it allows me to create custom comments on a clipboard, give them names & reuse them. The system allows me to underline, highlight, strikeout, & attach a comment to any of those marks. The comment hides in an icon until a student puts their mouse over it, which keeps the text relatively uncluttered. The interface is easy to use once you get used to it. I have found that I make more substantive comments because all the picky, mechanical issues can be handled by dragging & dropping a preformatted mark into the text. There is also a feature that allows me to make a general comment at the end of the essay. The result is that it takes me about the same amount of time to grade an essay, but in that time I can give the student a greater density of useful feedback.

Now, off to load some content for the summer course into Blackboard, a program with a much less intuitive user interface. On the upside, I’m sitting on my bed with three sleeping terriers surrounding me & a chocolate lab on the floor. Pretty good working conditions. Love having the laptop.