The Schoenblog

In my first few years teaching, I would have to reserve a day or two of my weekend to evaluate a few class sets of student essays. Projects, paragraphs, and any assignment that required feedback often became the focal point of my week, and too often I was looking backwards instead of forwards. I had to learn to find balance and to deliver feedback and grades more effectively so that the process takes less time and energy from me and gives more meaning to students--something I still struggle with.

I believe that grades should communicate what students know and can do, but a number or letter really does little to provide that information. Good evaluation also needs to provide meaningful feedback to help students’ understand their strengths and weaknesses and to help them progress and learn. While I’m not ready to throw out grades entirely, I’ve refocused a lot of my teaching and class time on more effective strategies for feedback to help students grow by asking students to do more.

Image from Bill Ferriter’s The Tempered Radical

5 Strategies for Peer and Self Assessment

Let’s help students grow by shifting the emphasis from the teacher to the learner in providing feedback. Through peer and self assessment, with a variety of tools and scaffolds, teachers can help students better understand learning tasks and assessments, communicate more and more effective feedback, and reduce the time and stress that’s often involved in grading and assessment.

1. Model, Practice, and Scaffold

All new skills take practice. Give students opportunities to practice giving constructive feedback so that they better understand what good feedback looks like. I ask students to become the teacher and to consider my comments when providing their own. We use samples from former students, mentor texts, or of my own creation to shift the emphasis off critiquing current student work and objectively analyzing and commenting on writing. 

Work with students to develop norms for effective feedback. What is constructive criticism? How many comments are appropriate? Should there be a balance of global and local comments? What are students looking for--grammar and writing? Big ideas? Provide students with scaffolding, a focus for feedback, and opportunities to practice interacting with and creating good feedback.

2. Collaborate and Build Community

Students do better when they write for real audiences, and when they know that their work will be read and evaluated by peers, they often are more careful and purposeful in the work. Use these opportunities to have students collaborate with partners and small groups to build trust and community. A new set of eyes will always provide a new perspective and insight on student work.

I love using online tools for this so that students can quickly and effectively write and provide feedback to one another. My classes work on Google+ Communities, where they can +1, reply to, and tag others in their work. Students can also see each other’s responses so that they have a copy of class notes, student products, and dozens of examples of effective feedback to always come back to. 

For more on Google Communities, check out Sharing and Publishing Student Work on Google Communities.

3. Provide Evaluation Criteria

Give students the same evaluation criteria you will use for their peer and self assessments. If they use and understand your rubrics or guidelines before they begin to provide feedback (and even begin the task themselves), they will be able to provide more meaningful comments and evaluation. 

I use Goobric and Doctopus to provide rubric-based feedback through Google Classroom. I can add the same rubric I give students with the assignment, select scores and qualities from the rubric, and then provide my own custom feedback, too. Additionally, I can add voice comments or use rubrics from the Goobric Library, which includes some Common Core and other standardized rubrics. A powerful recent addition is the ability for students to complete peer and self evaluations with Goobric, too. Find a guide to Goobric from Oli Trussell here.

4. Provide Choice

Like with most learning, student often do better when given options for responding to work. Sometimes I will ask them to respond in a specific way to practice a new skill or isolate a specific type of activity, but often I provide a range of feedback options.

Some students like to print hard copies of their work and self-assess. Others share on Google Drive and provide comments and suggestions. One of my favorites is using a Google Form, like this one. In this form, students respond to a guided checklist of questions and then provided more open-ended feedback. With the Form Mule or Simply Send add-ons, the results can be e-mailed directly to the student for a quick and thorough response.

For more on Form Mule, check out the first episode of The Schoencast here.

5. Provide Opportunities for Growth

For students to find value in the feedback, they need to be able to apply it to future learning. Often, that involves revision in my class. Other times, students reflect back on past feedback as they prepare for future learning and assessment. Without a direct application towards growth, though, the feedback is often ignored or forgotten.

For years, I saw the essays that I spent hours responding to wind up buried in folders, backpacks, and garbage cans. With revisions, reflections, Google Docs comments, and Doctopus, my students interact with the feedback in much more meaningful ways. And using the technology, they are accountable and always able to return to and learn from past successes and challenges.

A Work in Progress

I love asking students to provide feedback. Often this saves me time and energy because my students’ comments are effective and meaningful. With a check, plus one, or quick piece of feedback I can validate their work, check for understanding, and ensure that they are ready to move forward. Then, I can dedicate more time to the students who really need it, both as the creators and editors. 

Still, it’s important to remember that the students aren’t teachers. Many have trouble editing themselves and need a lot of help to give feedback to others. Some are uncomfortable sharing their work in the first place. All of these challenges take time, scaffolding, and persistence. With clear expectations and concrete steps, I find that almost all of my students benefit greatly from collaborative feedback. And by this point in the school year, I don’t need to give that direction anymore because it’s become a part of our class routine. 

Take the ideas and strategies that work for you and adapt them to be successful for your learners. The important part is to empower students, develop stronger understandings, and to create more opportunities for progress. Work differently to make the feedback and evaluation process more effective, easier, and less time consuming so we can continue to help students grow.

What are your favorite strategies for getting students more involved in the feedback process? Share in the comments here or on Twitter.

  

While most Google Apps have add-ons, for my money sheets and forms have those game changers that can really impact workflow, make your jobs more efficient, and transform your work. Below, find some of my favorite add-ons with brief explanations and applications. If you have one to add to the list, reach out on Twitter or in the comments!

Most Google Apps have an Add-ons menu on the top toolbar. Click Add-ons → Get Add-ons to start exploring!

The Best of the Best

Choice Eliminator, as the title suggests, removes an option from a multiple choice question after it has been selected, depending on your preferences. Each question can be customized depending on your intended quantity of responses.

I use Choice Eliminator to have students select groups and topics for projects. I share the responses sheet with them, and the add-on is used to keep all of that management seamless and electronic.





Form Mule is a mail merge utility. It combines the data across the rows of a spreadsheet into a template you create, and e-mails it to whoever you decide.

Use it to send form results to a user, e-mail students comments from a forms rubric, or to notify yourself when students submit form or sign up for appointments. Find much more on Form Mule on the first episode of the Schoencast here.





Autocrat is a document merge tool. It works similarly to Form Mule, in that it combines and merges data from a sheet or form. However, the power of Autocrat is that is can create .pdf or Google Docs that can be attached to an e-mail, fitting a .doc template you create.

Use Autocrat to send PD certificates or quiz results when participants complete a form. Many conferences do this to automate the certificate process. Or use it to merge those ugly rows of data into a nice, clean document from a student survey that you might not have really looked at since the first week of school. One day, I’ll write about my self-paced, automated quizzes that are based on Autocrat.





Copy Down copies formulas in a Google Sheet down a column.

Use Copy Down to automatically apply custom formulas to form results. For example, create a basic sum formula to total grades from a form quiz. Then, use Copy Down to fill that data when the form is submitted each time. Combine it with Form Mule to automate the return of the feedback. Since each new Google Form response actually inserts a new row, Copy Down is essential if you plan to use any formulas and accept new responses.





Flubaroo automatically grades a Google Form multiple choice quiz.

Use it to grade quizzes (duh!). The add-on compares your results of a submission as the key with student submissions, grades them, and provides some basic analytics on the data. It highlights problematic questions, low scoring questions, and can even e-mail scores and /or answer keys to students. Additionally, Flubaroo can be set to run automatically upon submission, and can now even be used for scoring open ended responses, too.

Bonus Round: 

Doctopus is an incredible Google Sheets add-on used to distribute templates. When paired with the extension Goobric, it’s incredibly useful for using rubrics to grade writing through Google Drive and Classroom. It deserves it’s own post, though, so while it’s incredible, I’ll keep it brief this time.

The More the Merrier

One of the great things about Google Apps is that new updates, products, extensions, and add-ons are coming all the time. The screenshots below show some of the ones I use in addition to my top 5. Number 6-10 could easily be a post on it’s own, too. Explore the Chrome store and make your life easier and teaching better with the power of the Forms and Sheets add-ons.

Welcome to post number 52 on the Schoenblog. If posts were weeks, it would almost be a year. Since last April, I’ve shared 52 posts and kept to my 2 per week schedule for the past few months religiously. Back when I started, my friends pushed me to write, and when Dani came up with the name Schoenblog, I took the leap.

Now, all these posts later, they’ve pushed me to take another jump forward.

If you read this blog, you know that I love forms and sheets and any way to automate feedback and communication to students and parents. I get excited about app-smashing and my mind is always racing with ideas and applications. I’m always sharing these ideas, along with my lessons and programmed forms, with my #PLN, specifically my #EdJusticeLeague Voxer group. We talk all day and ask questions, share best practices, and help each other continue to move forward with positivity and new ideas. As they reminded me, talk is great, but it’s so much better to see the learning in action.

Introducing….

The Schoencast: You Guide to EdTech Workflow

My goal is simple: to create short screencasts sharing how I use online tools to improve organization, communication, feedback, and automation to impact teaching and learning. Each episode will include a walk through or tips about an edtech tool and a classroom application. Then, after each video, I’ll follow up with more applications that I will explore in the months ahead.

This is my first attempt a screencast for a public audience and I would love your feedback and input. What worked? What didn’t? What can I do better? What topics would you like to see explored on the Schoencast?

The Schoencast Episode 1: Form Mule

Form Mule is a mail-merge tool, found in the Google Sheets add-ons. In this cast, I demonstrate how to use to automate a customized e-mail when a form is submitted. Below the video, find more ways to use Form Mule.

More Ways to Use Form Mule

• Send rubrics to students from Google Forms
• Have students provide peer feedback and e-mail to students
• Thank students for submitting work or information
• Combine with #IFTTT to automate Tweets
• E-mail students the next activity or assignment
• Provide targeted feedback based on a quiz in Google Forms
• Send individualized e-mails to parents
• Automatically send e-mail updates to administrators about student performance

Have a comment about the first ever Schoencast? An idea for a future episode? Want to learn more about an application listed above? Comment away or find me on Twitter @MrSchoenbart.

2. View Form Results.

You can either program this whole process to automate itself or wait and do it after students complete the form. If you are automating, fill out the form with some dummy data, like I did below.

3. Add a Formula Column

View my results spreadsheet here if it helps. Columns A through F are filled with the basic form results. Now, in column G I added a column titled Birthday?.

In cell, G2, copy and paste this formula: 

=if(month(E2)&day(E2)= month(today())&day(today()),"SEND","")

The formula above assumes that cell E2 has the first student’s birthday in it. Then, it says if the month and day of today match the month and day of E2, then SEND. If today is the student’s birthday, the cell will actually read “SEND,” otherwise it will remain blank. This is essential for the next step. The formula looks a little complicated, but you don’t need to change anything unless your birthday column is not E. Thanks a lot to Alice Keeler for help with the formula. Believe it or not, my first draft was much more complicated, and she gave me the one above, which is much simpler and elegant. Follow her for all the best Google tips.


Now you need to fill that formula down the entire column. The simple way to do this is to click the cell, grab the blue square in the right corner, and simply drag down the column after the data is submitted in the form. This means have the students complete the form, then fill the code. Alternatively, check out the Copy Down add-on for Sheets to automate this if you want to have the formula fill each cell in the column as data is submitted live.

Form Mule Sheets Add On

Form Mule is a fantastic mail merge add-on for Google Sheets. It plugs the information from a row and merges it into an e-mail to match a template you design.

For this task, Form Mule is used to merge the data into the subject line of an e-mail.

4. Install Form Mule

In sheets, click Add-ons on the top menu (between Table and Help). Then click Get add-ons. Search for Form Mule, click the green Free button, and install it. Follow the directions to authorize it to use your account.

5. Launch Form Mule

Once you install an Add-on, it’s there to stay and can always be found on the Add-ons for that particular Google App. For this task in Form Mule, most of the default settings are where we want things. Once you launch, a box like the one below should pop up. Select Form Responses 1 as your sheet with the merge data (or the appropriate one if you’ve made any changes).

To help automate the process, turn on Time Trigger. Select Day timer and pick a time for the process to run every day. I suggest using a time that students are in school, or at least presumably awake, because this is the time that the Tweeting process will automatically run.

When your settings match mine below, click Next

5. Edit the Send Conditions and Template

Form Mule will run for every submission unless we set a specific condition; we only want it to run when the current date matches the student birthday. To do this, we need to create a send condition. On the Send Condition drop down menu, find the BIRTHDAY? column we created a few steps back. In the blank box on the right, type SEND. This will match the formula from step 4, which means that the e-mail to automate the Tweet will only send if the dates match.


Next, click Save and then Edit on the bottom of the panel.

Finally, we have to tell Form Mule what to send in the e-mail, and it’s fairly simple. The only fields that need any text are To: and Subject:.



In To:, type the new e-mail you have created for automating Tweets.

In Subject:, we need to type the message that you want Tweeted. What you type here will be the exact message Tweeted, but the student information from the form will replace the information in the brackets.

For example, this subject line:

Happy Birthday, <<Last Name:>> <<First Name:>> <<Twitter Handle:>>!
Will Tweet (which you can see by clicking preview in the window above):


Feel free to adjust the subject line to meet your needs. Include a class hashtag or other message. You can merge any additional information from the form as necessary, too, but make sure to be mindful of the 140 character limit.

6. If This Then That

Finally, we are ready. We have used a Form to get the information, used a Sheets formula and add-on to automate an e-mail to wish the student a happy birthday on the right day. Now, we need to make that e-mail trigger a Tweet.

To do this, we will use If This Then That recipe gmail to twitter. The key here is to create your #IFTTT account using the same e-mail you entered in the To: field of Form Mule. Once you do this and authorize the Twitter channel, you are almost done.


Once the recipe is turned on, enter your e-mail address in the Trigger field. This is your normal e-mail--the same Google Account you used for the Form, Sheet, and Form Mule. In Action, it should say Subject, just like it does below. Basically, this means that when the account e-mail (the new one you created) receives an e-mail from you (which is what Form Mule will do on the birthday), Tweet out the message.

Happy Birthday to You

So to recap: The form results populate the sheet, which copies the formula to verify the birthday. Then, when the birthday occurs, the formula fills the column with SEND, triggering Form Mule to merge the row into a birthday message, sent to your new e-mail address. Finally, #IFTTT, with the gmail to Twitter recipe, sends the subject line of the merged e-mail to Twitter. Still following?

Happy Birthday, Bruce Wayne @IAmBatman!

— Adam Schoenbart (@MrSchoenbart) September 16, 2015

I know it seems complicated, but trust me: it gets easier. App smashing with add-ons and #IFTTT is a powerful tool for responsive blogging and automating the process. If you give it a try, let me know how it goes. If you have any ideas to make it better, I’d love to know that, too.

Here’s what you need to do:

SAMPLE & RESULTS: PEER FEEDBACK

I used this add-on with the form below to have Ss provide specific feedback about a project.

Peer Review Form

With the checkbox option, one student can provide automated feedback to a group of students!

Every student will review four peers, so that all students have a few different sets of form results.

Here is how the appended results look:

Student Sample 1

Student Sample 2

The feedback itself is a work in progress, but the workflow is great. Then, Ss will already have their work organized through Classroom with a record of the feedback. They can Turn it in afterwards to share with me, or I can view the work in progress since I made and own the templates. I don't need to share or e-mail ANYTHING--DocAppender does it all. You could do a similar organization with Doctopus but Classroom worked great for me.

PORTFOLIO REFLECTIONS

I also have Ss reflect on work in a portfolio. I want to use DocAppender to log their reflections and revisions. Ss will select their own name on the form and reflect. Results will be appended to the Doc after each submission, creating a running log of progress throughout the year.

I haven’t fully tried this yet, but heres’ my form: Multiple Choice Portfolio. Each time they submit, I can review their results and have Ss turn in at the end of each quarter.

If anyone has any ideas to make it better, let me know!

I was excited to learn If This Then That and play with recipes. I love the idea using tech to make this work more efficient.

Events List: The other major update was to provide a list of all of the events featured on the calendar. You can peruse each month, but what if you want to search for EdCamps? 

Thanks to Awesome Table, this was easy! I made a new worksheet and transposed the information I needed. I'm so excited about this sites gadget. You can now index all of the events and search by name, date, type, or location. Want a conference in NY in May? That's easy. Check it out! I also learned to play with the SORT function on sheets to alphabetize the list. This simple function will save me so much time sorting student data from forms; I feel silly for not finding it earlier.

The starting ideas was fairly simple: a collaborative, crowdsourced and completely public calendar of #edtech events in the area. Here's what I knew:

• I wanted to use a Google Calendar so people could add events to their own calendars
• I wanted to use a Google form and add-ons to manage the automation
• I wanted to leave everything public and collaborative, but still needed the ability to administer and edit
• I wanted to be able to give contributers credit for their ideas and events

The Workflow:

For the most part, I don't know code. I have a growing desire to learn, and used to do web design with HTML and basic java, so I'm by no means a beginner. However, I haven't practiced the skills in years and didn't want to talk that on. So without New Visions Lab and their many wonderful add-ons, nothing would have worked. I use nearly all of their products, and plan to write about the many ways I do so to improve my teaching life.

Here is what I did to make the calendar live:

1. Create a new calendar. This was easy. I created a new calendar in Google Calendar, made it public, and found the address in settings.
2. Install Old Form Mule. Form Mule is a wonderful mail merge add-on that automates e-mails based on form results. The old version, in scripts, also allows for a Calendar merge. With this script, I automated e-mails to the site admins notifying us of new additions, and automated calendar merges. We thought about added an approval/moderation feature, but it seemed to be more trouble that it's worth. Keep it open and public but we still have admin rights to change the calendar.
3. Copy Down. Form Mule wants the date for the calendar event to be in the Date Time format, so I used Copy Down to combine this data into the add-on-friendly format. Every time a form result is submitted, any code copied to cells gets pushed down, adding a new line of data. Copy Down is great because it lets you copy formulas to organize and manipulate new data.
4. Form Router. We wanted to be able to credit contributors by listing their contact info. The obvious was to do this was to pull data from the form results, but it's hard to manipulate in the sheet. Form Router helped by appending form results to second Google Sheet in real time. We could manipulate data, add links to contact info, and publish it without messing up the form results.
5. Google Site. Lastly, we built the Google Site for #EdTechCalNYNJ. This was easy! The calendar, contributor page and form were all seamless to embed. Piece of cake!

If you like the calendar, can use this workflow in your life, ate anything delicious today, or have anything to share, please comment!