For many years I have found marking a bit of an issue, there seems to be less and less time for it yet the feedback we provide is one of the most important tools in moving students forward. One of my main concerns is that you start, get given another job that is more important, and then have to find you way back into it. This is particularly difficult when you were half way through someone’s work. Add to that the fact that students make improvements but do not sign post these, meaning you have to trawl back through all their work to just find the odd line that is the difference between a C and a B grade.

Since going completely electronic the frustrations have double. Despite given them effective folder structures and doing lots of work on the importance of suitable file names, students still seem to struggle to stay organised. Maybe they need a few years of disorganisation to understand why we keep going on about how important it is to keep things in order. More recently visiting moderators said that the electronic hand-ins were a little confusing, citing students not naming documents correctly or failing to place documents in the correct folders. One moderator stated that it would good to give students a list of work under objective titles and get them to link to the work in their areas so it was easy to see what they had done. This got me to thinking, could we solve all these issues within one document? What I had been doing was giving each student the coversheets I needed to fill in for the moderator and instead of comments on what they had done placed in feedback that students could use to improve their work. This also caused issues as sometimes the objective would cover a multitude of areas, for instance it may say ‘show an understanding of effective methods of communication’, which means very little to students. Actually what they wanted was a list of tasks with individual comments on each. So rather than understand communication methods they wanted this broken down to ‘write a report on written communication techniques’, ‘create a video on verbal techniques and body language’ and ‘do a presentation on effective questioning’. I decided, therefore to add this to the solution so rather then them having a list of tasks on one document, a separate set of objectives on another and feedback on a third this would be collated into one area.

My solution, therefore, is a spreadsheet containing two workbooks. The first is a working document where students link work done to a checklist and then when they are marked I give comments and suggest improvements to these. The second is an overview of which objectives have been passed. This is working out brilliantly so far as students have a checklist, can link in documents so they are easy for the moderator and myself to access regardless of how well organised the students folders are, allows me to quickly see what needs remarking and lets me give students quick feedback. In detail the columns are as follows…

• Before the columns the students name and target appear
• The first column underneath lists tasks under objectives
• The second gives students an area to link their files to
• The third is a drop down menu that tells students if work is marked and allows them to state if they want work marked or remark, the cell goes green for marked, yellow for remark or red for to be marked. This means I can quickly look and see what needs to be marked, if I get pulled away half way through I can easily pick up where I left off
• The fourth tells the student if work is not done, partially done or completed. Again this is colour coded so they can quickly see what needs improving based on colour rather than reading every cell
• The final column gives feedback

It takes a while to set up sheets for each unit but it has saved so much time and allowed students to organise work and understand what improvements need to be made.

Attached is the spreadsheet for the Unit 1 Front Sheet. Feel free to download and use it, you can also contact me if you want any more I have created. I hope these ideas help you, although it is a bit of work at first it most definitely saves time in the future and in this day and age time is one thing us teachers really need to find.