Grade Anywhere: Mobile Grading on the iPad

Grade Anywhere – Turnitin for iPad (Mobile)

RAY:    Welcome to today’s webcast.  My name is Ray Huang.  And today’s webcast is Grade Anywhere with Turnitin for iPad.  In the next half hour or so we’ll be sharing with you all what Turnitin for iPad is all about.

Now, like I said my name is Ray Huang.  I’m the customer programs manager here for Turnitin.  I’m typically developing programs to help our users become successful at using Turnitin by contributing to features in the Turnitin blog and newsletters and connecting with our Turnitin community via social media.  So, be sure to follow us there on Twitter at Turnitin.  And like us on our Facebook page.  That’s facebook.com/Turnitinteachers.  And if you are the Tweeting type, the live Tweeting type, we’ll be using the hashtag gradeanywheretoday, all one word.

Now let’s go and get started with the video just to get, just to set the mood.

(VIDEO)

Alright so that was our intro video and yes those were my chubby fingers there in that video.  So yeah I moonlight as a hand model.  

When we set out to develop Turnitin for iPad we wanted to see, we wanted to take all those favorite features and familiar, the favorite and familiar features of grading with Turnitin.  Now those are those features that have proven to reduce instructors’ grading time by 31%. It improved the quality of their feedback by 52% and increased student engagement by 46%.  

We wanted to take all those features and present them in a new way, in a new experience, a better experience.  And that’s Turnitin for iPad.  As our video quickly showed it does offer tons of avenues of feedback so you can use one, use some of them, or use them all.  Among those of course, originality check feedback.  You know that’s Turnitin’s bread and butter.   What we’re known for is our originality check.  So that features of course available.  We’ve got tons of ways to leave on paper comments, like QuickMark Comments, Bubble Comments, Inline Comments, Colored Highlights and Strikethrough as well.  And then you can also get kind of more broader feeder there with General Comments, Voice Comments, and of course our great interactive Rubric Scoring.  

So those are all features that then you should be familiar with.  And if you’re not, those are features that are there broadly in Turnitin and our GradeMark (Online Grading) product.  But one of the great things that Turnitin offers is the ability here to go offline.  Now Turnitin’s a great web application.  And it’s great for online grading.  But sometimes you’re not always connected.  Sometimes you don’t want to be connected.  Or sometimes you just can’t be connected.  So Turnitin for iPad does allow you to sync your papers to your iPad and grade those offline.  And when you get back connected it will sync every five minutes or so when you have a good connection there.  It will sync all your grades.  Sync all your papers.  And the great thing is, it’s available.  It works with most of our popular learning management system integrations.  So that is always fantastic.  And the way you do that with Turnitin for iPad.  You log into your learning management system.  Open up a paper and what you’ll see now is this little iPad icon that you click on that and get this way to generate an iPad access code,  You get a unique access code that you can then punch in when you log into Turnitin for iPad.  

And within Turnitin for iPad there’s this great interactive tutorial which really helps you guide through most of the popular features.  And I’ll be going through some of those with you today.  A couple things to make sure you guys understand.  This is an instructor access only iPad.  So right now there’s no access for students.  Students can still access everything traditionally through our web browser, but at this time it’s only an instructor access and it’s focused.  You know, we did that intentionally to focus it on instructor grading.  So we can provide you guys a great app.  It’s available as a free download in the app store.  

Now joining me today is Nick Carpenter.  Nick is a Latin teacher and a technology coordinator at Miramonte High School in California.  Nick led a small group of beta users at Miramonte High School and he’s also managing the school deployment of iPads to faculty and students at the school.  So Nick I want to thank you for joining us today.

NICK:    Well thanks for having me.

RAY:    Great.  And Nick would you mind telling us maybe a little bit more about Miramonte High School’s availability of iPad to its faculty and students.  Who got them and why?

NICK:        So Miramonte started out with iPads about two, three years ago.  What we did then, we call it Carte Model.  Which would we have a carte of iPad’s that teachers would check out for a given number of periods.  And then as iPads became more and more popular we started giving them to individual teachers who were interested in developing curriculum.  And then last year we started a one to one pilot with our freshman class.  And so we gave half the freshman class their iPad for checkout for the whole year.  And this year we’re continuing to expand that with handing out iPads to the juniors and seniors and making iPads available to the teachers that request them.  

RAY:    Oh, so how many iPads is that that’s actually deployed out there at the school?

NICK:    We have probably 300 to 350 iPads deployed at our school.  We’re a high school.  We’re about 1200 students and we have a faculty of about 70 to 80.

RAY:    Okay.  Great.  Now you were among a few instructors at your school that beta tested the iPad over the spring and summer.  So tell us, what were some of your first impressions I guess of Turnitin for iPad?

NICK:    My first impression that it was really nice to grade on the iPad.  I’m a technology coordinator and I’m used to working around computers but I don’t like to grade and I don’t like to read off the computer.  When the iPads came around, just like I would never read an online magazine on my computer.  I love reading my online magazines on my iPad or grading papers is so much easier because it’s just your physical body the way you grade.  Because usually you’re sitting in a chair or hunched over on a desk and you can do either of those with an iPad.  Where a computer, you’re almost locked into position and you can’t adjust and make yourself comfortable.  And if you’re grading, you know, a hundred and a hundred fifty papers at a time your comfort level is a big deal.

RAY:    Yeah, certainly.  Now, so you didn’t use, I take it you didn’t use Turnitin much for grading before because of this.  You couldn’t really sit for that long period of time and you couldn’t really get comfortable, right?

NICK:    No I couldn’t sit for a long time.  We’d use Turnitin but we’d just basically just run the originality reports and so a common practice that teachers would use at our school would have the students turn it in to Turnitin.com and then turn in a hard copy that would be graded at the same time.  So it was kind of redundant.

RAY:    Right.  Right.  So I guess from, what did you use before?  Did you use some other type of technology for grading papers?  Or were you just kind of a, did you have to use the pen and paper kind of hard copy method then for grading?

NICK:    We just used pen and paper just for gradings.  We didn’t, I mean we’d turn it in.  We had another originality checker before.  But we just would turn that one in.  We did the same practice where we would, they would turn it in to the originality checker.  We’d check to see for plagiarism and then we’d grade the pen and paper just hard copy.   

RAY:    Okay.  Well thanks for giving us some of that background.  I want to take a sec here to kind of shift gears and give you kind of a hands on demo.  I’ll be sharing – center that there – so I’m sharing kind of a, I’m using a iPad emulator so I’m doing stuff live on my iPad but you will not unfortunately get to see my fingers do the tapping.  So I will walk you guys through some of the basic functions here.

Now, for simplicity sake I am going to skip the log in process.  But when you do first open up Turnitin, the Turnitin app, you can log in.  If you log in traditionally through Turnitin.com at your same user name and password, no big change there.  And if you use a learning management system, it’s like I explained before, you jump into your LMS, open up a paper in Turnitin and generate a unique iPad access code.  And you can enter that in at the access code point if you want to – and you have to do that for each class that you’re teaching through that LMS.  So you’d enter your first one and you’d get logged in here.  And then you can tap this at a class with access code link there, just above the red button.  So you’d tap that and then you’d be able to add an additional class and just basically put in your additional class access codes.  And then all your classes will populate into your list of classes.  

So in this particular example I’m teaching two classes.  And hopefully I’ll jump into the right one.  And let me also bring your attention real quick to this blue tri tutorial button.  That’s what I had mentioned.  There’s a quick tutorial that you can use just by tapping that and it gives you a quick walkthrough of all the top features to get you started.  And I’m essentially going to be doing that with you today.  So I just tapped into my sociology and anthropology class.  And let’s jump into one of my cultural norms class.  How does that sound?  So open up my cultural norms class.  I’ve gone about, most of the way through grading.  I still have a couple papers left.  And what you see on the right hand side there, you see these color coded, yellow, green, red dots there with a percentage.  That’s not the grade.  That’s actually the similarity score, or the overall similarity score for that paper.  And by default, these are all default, these are all separated by what’s ungraded, graded, and what hasn’t been submitted yet.  So you can see real quickly what you need to do, what’s left to do.  So I’ve got two papers left and I’ve got four kids that haven’t submitted their papers.  It’s great to know at a glance and it’s great to know, you know, what the originality levels are for these.  

So I’m going to open up Tom Kaczynski’s paper, Miracle on Ice.  And what you want to do first is you can open up an originality report.  So the way you do that is you see this little graphite on there, that second icon from the right.  So I’m going to tap on that to open up the originality report and I’m going to just turn that on.  When I turn that on that opens up that whole originality layer.  It gives you a quick overview of where these papers were submitted, or where the matches were matched to in this particular case.  A lot of these came from previously submitted student papers and a publication here from USA.  So that’s that first one.  So I could tap on that and get a quick preview of that text.  Now this, if you’re a Turnitin user, this should be pretty familiar use case, just in a slightly different way.  So you get the preceding sentence and the sentence after and you get the matched text there.  So you can get a little bit of context.  And on the case of student papers, of course, you don’t get to actually look at the other student’s papers, due to privacy reasons.  And through the web version you’re able to kind of request access to the other teacher in this, with the app, unfortunately you cannot do that.  But this gives you a sense of the originality of the paper.  But really you guys are here to learn how to use this to grade.  So, for grading it’s really simple.  You can see I already left a couple comments here.  So we’ve got our QuickMark comments.  Now QuickMark Comments, how that works, how actually all these comments now, the on paper marks work is you tap anywhere on the screen and you get this new contextual window.  You’ll see in the web version we have the sidebar.  In the Turnitin for iPad app we have this contextual menu that pops up and you can see the three different types of comments you can leave.  Either a QuickMark Comment, a Bubble Comment or an Inline Text Comment there.  So Quick Mark Comments, of course, these are our preloaded editorial marks that you can leave.  So we can select any of these and just leave them really quickly.  So I’ll grab our commonly used and I’ll drop let’s say improper citation there.  And I think you just tap and hold and drag that anywhere else I need it to go, to move that mark.  So as I expand it.  So I tap on the icon, tap on the QuickMark that I just left and you can see a quick definition and a link to some more information about what improper citation is.  That’s how all of our marks are.  And of course you can create your own marks as well.

If you have a comment that you want to leave on your own.  Let’s leave a nice comment here about this photo.  You can do it with the Bubble Comment.  And with the Bubble Comment you can leave a comment.  Comment here.  Nice photo. And then you can just tap anywhere off the screen to save it.  So now that comment there is saved.  I you decide, hey I’m using this comment all the time, you can tap that QuickMark icon in the upper left and you can actually save this as a QuickMark Comment and add it to a set.  So I can call this the nice photo comment and tap on commonly used.  And it will let me choose which QuickMark set I should leave this on.  I’m not going to do that in this particular case.  Just I want to save us some time.

You can, of course, leave Intext Comments.  That’s pretty straight forward but it’s great for making sure that your students see what you want them to write.  So this is the old school version, or the new school version I should say of leaving marginal comments there.

So Nick I want to bring things back to you here and maybe if you can give us your thoughts, since you’re relatively new now to this online grading concept or this electronic grading concept.  So how have you felt being able to leave these sort of editorial marks on the paper in this way?  How has that worked for you?

NICK:    It’s worked really well and actually I’m kind of, I’m used to using the iPad and you gave us a quick introduction to the beta and showed us where the tutorial was, but I was able to jump right in with skipping over the tutorial.  Because it operates very similarly to, if you’re reading an iBook and you highlight or if you want to define something.  So if you’re used to reading things on an iPad, the Turnitin app works very similarly to all those functions.  And so it was very easy to highlight and to use the common apps.  And also the big difference between grading online or on a computer or compared to an app, is that it’s more tactile.  You can use your finger to touch the lines, so it more closely mimics you writing with a pen than dragging your mouse.  And again, that helps up with speed.  It just feels more natural for most of our teachers to grade.

RAY:    Great.  And one thing I forgot to mention is to show you guys how highlighting and strikethrough works.  So how that works is you just tap on a line of text and you just hold it for about a few seconds and then it, by default, highlights that whole line and then you can drag these little handles there at the ends of each line to adjust it.  And once that’s there you can decide, do you want to leave, do you want to highlight that with a QuickMark, or a Custom Comment or whatever.  Let me go ahead and leave something seemingly worthwhile.  So that will be associated.  I just put tense shift.  I don’t know.  I don’t know what kind of comments I’m leaving here, but in this particular case that will associate it with that highlight.  And if you want to change the color of that highlight you can.  Orange is a favorite color of mine so I’ll just go ahead and highlight that one in orange.  So that’s a nice little feature.

And then the same thing with the strike through.  You highlight the line and you can just hit this s with the red line through it and that will strike through the text, like so.  So those are the on paper comments.  Now there’s also an additional level here if you click this pencil like or tap.  I’ve got to get used to saying tap instead of click because this is the iPad.  If you tap the little pencil icon there in the upper right, that takes you over to this new great overview panel.  Here we go.  And there you can leave your general comments, voice comments and work with your rubrics that you’ve attached.  

So general comments are straight forward.  You just hit that little edit and you can just type free form, whatever you want to write.  It’s great for leaving some holistic feedback.  We’ve got voice comments here so you can just tap this and start recording a voice comment.  You can leave one voice comment on each paper of up to three minutes in length.  So it’s great for conveying tone, leaving a message, something personalized really for that student.  So you can leave that message for up to three minutes.  Stop that and it will automatically save.

And then the Rubrics.  I think Rubrics are one of the most fantastic little pieces here of Turnitin grading in general.  So with our interactive Rubrics I’ve just opened it up here and I’ve got attached here one of our great common core state standards line Rubrics for the eleventh and twelfth grade.  And we’ve got those available in Turnitin for middle schools and for high school levels.  For three different, we’ve to argumentative, informative and narrative assignment types.  And we’ll be extending that as well.  But how this works is, you know, you’ve got your criteria and your scale there and you just tap in each of these cells of how you want to score the paper.  Now the great thing about this is it’s automatically calculating all the grades, the grade for you.  So you can see that.  It’s averaged out to a 4.67 out of 5 which equals a 93%.  That looks good to me.  I’ll click apply percent to grade and just like that my assignment’s been graded 93 out of a hundred and that will push to my grade book and all that stuff just like as if it was entered in dot.com.  

And say you want to override this, despite your Rubric saying it’s a 93, you believe in your heart it’s a 95.  Let’s go ahead and give him a 95.  You just edit the grade, hit 95 and tap anywhere off there to modify the grade.  And that again will automatically sync to your paper there.  Now Nick do you have any thoughts on using these electronic Rubrics and anything like that that you want to add?

NICK:    Yeah, the one thing I like about the Rubrics is I think I got involved in tech early on because I’m awful with paper.  And the nice thing is that the Rubric is automatically attached to the paper.  I’m not keeping track of two things or have to staple them together.  So that’s very nice.  

Also with Rubrics, you know, most experienced teachers can read a paper and just tell you a grade without using a Rubric.  But what Rubrics really do is it gives meaningful feedback to the students.  They can have that consistent feedback where they know how to improve their writings.  Because most experienced teachers can read a paper and say it’s a B paper.  But sometimes a student gets a B paper and they don’t know why it’s a B paper or how to get to the next level.  So I felt the Rubric feature really nice and on the website where you could edit it, it was great.  And it made grading really quick and consistent.

RAY:    Great, thanks for sharing that Nick.  Now perhaps one of the awesome parts here is offline grading.  And let’s jump to that real quick.  Or the syncing process.  Essentially back here at our class dashboard I guess it’s called, there is the class assignment list.  I can hit this little refresh icon here.  That’s the third icon from the top, from the right, and just says synchronize now.  Automatically this thing will synchronize all my papers.  If I want to force sync it.  You can also set it up so it just syncs automatically every five minutes.  So, and often times it’s faster than that.  It’s whenever you do any significant change to that paper.  It’s going to go and ping our servers and sync that up when you need it to which is fantastic.  

Now, so the offline grading here is awesome because now you’re not tethered to your computer and you can move onto your couch.  And that’s great.  You can still do that with Wi-Fi but now you’re able to go out even further.  Let’s say you don’t have Wi-Fi but you’re on the train or whatever.  You can grade, literally grade anywhere.  So Nick have you had a chance to grade anywhere?

NICK:    Yes.  I love to be able to use the offline feature when you sync it.  The other thing about the offline feature that’s nice is since it’s on your app it moves so much faster because you don’t have to wait for the paper to upload.  Because when I was on the web version, you know, depending on your internet speed it could take a little while.  But when it’s on the app and it’s already downloaded, you’re moving through papers very quickly, which is nice.  I’ve had the chance to actually grade in doctor’s offices or anytime I’m waiting for an appointment or if I’m on public transit.  And sometimes, being a technology coordinator, I get stuck in some meetings that are large that I really don’t have to participate, so I can pull out my iPad and get a paper or two done.

RAY:    Alright, thanks Nick.  Yeah, we’ve all been in those meetings, believe me.  Some of you guys might be grading right now during our little meeting here.  So we’re doing this contest.  We love the idea of grading anywhere.  So we’re doing a little contest.  If you share with us, and share with the community here how you’re grading anywhere, whether that, you can send that with a photo or write it up as a short little essay.  Send that into us and we’re going to be picking a winner just to win a thousand dollars.  And we’ll be posting these on our blogs and on our Facebook pages and Twitter and whatnot.  Because we really want to encourage this idea of being able to grade anywhere.  To free yourself.  

And you’ve seen probably on Turnitin.com we’ve got some of these amazing pictures, these amazing landscapes.  And sure you may not be going off to the Egyptian Pyramids to grade.  I’m sure you’d rather whip out your iPad and take some great photos of that.  You do have the ability, if you really wanted to, to grade there as well.  And you can enter that.  There’s a way to enter right on our Turnitin for iPad page there.  Very good stuff.  And we’ll be announcing a winner in December about the grade anywhere contest.  

So I guess let’s open things up to questions and I will start off, and I know we’re going a little bit over.  I’m just going to take a few questions here.  But let’s start off with a question about implementation and roll out.  Now Nick, you’re the tech coordinator there at Miramonte High School.  And you have lots of folks using iPad.  How do you approach kind of managing all these devices?

NICK:    Well we use a configurator and also we use a mobile device manager, an MDM called Meraki.  And so with that it’s actually really easy to push out apps and since the Turnitin app itself is a free app, dealing with free apps is a lot easier to push out than dealing with paid apps.  So if you have any sort of iPad deployment you can handle this app the same way you handle all your other apps.  And also if you don’t do a uniform iPad deployment, it’s a free app, and so if teachers have their own personal iPads they can easily download the app themselves.

RAY:    Great.  Thanks Nick.  Now we’ve got a couple other questions here I want to answer.  First from Marcia, she says are the filters for the originality reports still available on the app?  We treat the app, at least the originality portion on the app, as sort of an originality check light.  So you do lose a little bit of the filtering ability.  So you won’t be able to kind of exclude matches or change the threshold levels from within the app.  You can do that from the browser version but not directly on the app here.  

Another question we have is how many papers can you sync to the iPad?  That’s from Kathryn.  You know it’s pretty much as much as your iPad can hold.  So that will depend on how many videos and movies and photos and music you have on your iPad.  So yeah, by, there’s another question here about does it mean that the papers take space locally on your iPad?  And yes it’s going to.  So it’s going to take up some space on your iPad.  At this time, in the current version there’s no way to really say stop syncing these papers or, you know, I’m done grading this set and you want to get rid of them.  What you can do is unlink your iPad.  And it’s basically like logging out.  And when you log out it will flush all those papers out of your memory.  And then when you log back in you can select only the classes that you want, that you want to sync.  

And then I think I’ll just take one last question here from Sally.  She says does the teacher have to specify each paper to be downloaded or will the iPad download all the papers in the class automatically?  When you first get into the app.  When you first get into your class list, none of the papers will be downloaded.  And you’ll tap into your first class, your first assignment, I mean, your first submitted paper.  And it will pop up, it will say, do you want to sync the rest of these papers for this assignment?  If you don’t want to do that you can just say no.  Or you can say yes and it will just go into the auto sync and it will sync all, it will download all those papers and start auto syncing those every few minutes.  

So that’s going to bring us up to the time that we have for today’s session.  I’m sorry that we couldn’t get to every question that was asked but I hope you’ll walk away with a better understanding of Turnitin for iPad.  So I hope you’ll join us for some additional live and on demand webcasts on a variety of categories, like grading and feedback, preventing plagiarism, improving writing skills and engaging students.  So we’ve a ton of these scheduled for live and we have them all available on demand as well.

Nick I want to thank you for sharing your experience using Turnitin for iPad.  Thank you for joining us.  And I also want to thank you all for taking the time to join us to learn more about Turnitin for iPad.  And I challenge you to get out there and grade anywhere.