Doctopus and Goobric... They Are Amazing!

Unfortunately, I had to miss our last Thursday class because of parent-teacher conferences. So as a make up for not being able to come to class, I'm adding an extra post into the blog. In my wanderings at Thurston, I was introduced to this AMAZING add-ons for Google Chrome, and I want to share my knowledge with you all. The add-ons are called Doctopus and Goobric. Lisa and I submitted an article to the MACUL journal about these add-ons because they truly do change the way we grade papers, but I also wanted to spread the info through my blog too.

So, hopefully I've caught your attention enough to ask, "Holly, what is this crazy add-on you're so excited about?" Well, imagine a world where you don't have to carry home a gigantic stack of 150 essays to grade. What if you could grade your essays electronically with a digital rubric that emails itself to your students after you're done grading? Doctopus and Goobric offer the ability to  import and organize all of your students work in one spreadsheet. Then grade their work and import the grades back over to the same spreadsheet. I actually used this add-on with my mentor to grade my student's mid-term papers, and I was amazed at how easy and efficient this program was to use. The program organizes all of your student's work in Google Sheets along with the links to each individual's document. Within Sheets you also create your rubric, which will then appear in your Google Docs like so:

The rubric becomes boxes that you can click on, which will then assign the corresponding number grade to the student. There is also a space where you can write additional comments for the student, and all of the Google Doc commenting features are still available. After grading, the rubric attaches itself to the end of the student's document, and emails itself to the student for their review. If you ask me, that's pretty awesome. I certainly plan on using this method of grading to stop wonderful question of, "Is my paper graded yet?" because the students will know as soon as you're done with grading their work.

I'll stow the used car salesman pitch about these add-ons for a second here to pause to reflect. At the beginning of his crazy journey called the MAC program, Google Drive just seemed like a nice tool for collaboration and making presentations. After working with this program on almost a daily basis, it has evolved in to a tool that I can use for collaboration and assessment on top of my own personal use. I'm a huge fan of efficiency, and I think this tool gives us the ability to not only be more efficient with grading, but also more transparent. I hope you find it just as helpful as I do!

Need more info about Doctopus and Goobric? Click Here