Friday, April 10, 2015

Blending Doctopus and Goobric with Google Classroom

Not a very inventive title, but an accurate one.

So, I just graded my first set of research papers using Doctopus so I can use the Goobric grading rubric.  It was....pretty dang awesome.  It made grading the essays a lot easier and less irritating than I remember them being in the past. 

What Doctopus is is a free way to use your Google Drive via sheets to handle Google Document assignments from your students.  Here is a quick video on what Doctopus is:



I had never looked into Doctopus before since I use Google Classroom, but the prospect of being able to use Goobric to grade some projects intrigued me, especially for the 11th grade research essay.  This essay took up a month of instruction and is worth a lot of points for the students.  Here is a video about using Goobric that includes some direction.



I did a little research to find out about Doctopus and Goobric (The two go hand-in-hand).  I was particularly looking for ways to incorporate it with Classroom and found some blog posts.  Here are two good ones I found:  one from Richard Bryne and one from Jennie Magiera.  There I found some very useful "How To" videos.

Now, I'm not sure how often I'll be able to use Goobric for grading because it's department policy to use the district's 6-point grading rubric for essays, which is holistic.  Goobric is not really set up for holistic grading, but this was definitely worth sharing.