Good to Great: Use Goobric for Peer Edits and Student Self-Assessment

This weekend I wrote about three rubric add-ons for Google Apps. Today I used one of them, Doctopus and Goobric, to grade lab reports. I first wrote about Doctopus and Goobric two years ago when I started using them to grade lab reports. There have been a number of improvements since then and I have wanted to highlight them here for some time.

If you haven't used Doctopus and Goobric, they are definitely worth a look. Doctopus, an octopus for your documents, is an add-on for Google Sheets. With a little bit of work ahead of time and by following the excellent instructions in the tool, you go from a spreadsheet to every member of a class having his/her own copy of an assignment. Along the way, you can also create folders in your students' Google Drives where you can drop things for them to view or edit. Doctopus does lots of other spectacular things too - like allows for group assignments to be copied, allows you to turn off student access to documents, and allows you to see from the spreadsheet how many times a student has edited an assignment. It also allows you to attach a rubric for grading. This is where Goobric comes in.

Goobric, a rubric for Google, is a web application that facilitates paperless grading with a rubric. You create your rubric with your own specifications (or get one from Goobric's public libraries) and attach it to the document. Like magic, a link to grade it appears in the Doctopus-enabled spreadsheet. Click the link and you see a view like this:

The rubric appears across the top and you can enter scores or click in a box containing the description. The rubric remains stationary while you scroll through the paper so you can read and grade at the same time. You can comment through the document or leave comments in the box at the top. When you are finished, click the blue submit button and you can automatically advance to the next student in the spreadsheet.

As of 2016, Goobric got even better! Now there is a Chrome Extension called Goobric for Students that allows students to self-assess their work with the rubric or conduct peer evaluations. 

When the students have this extension installed, they will get a pop-up while they work that reminds them that a rubric is attached to a assignment. Hopefully, they view the rubric while they work!

In order to access this terrific feature, you will need to check the middle checkbox seen in the screenshot below when you attach the Goobric to an assignment:

When students open the assignment and complete their work, they can also access the rubric to do a self-assessment before handing it in. They will be able to see feedback from the rubric, but a teacher's scores will override these peer evaluations.

The first time I graded reports paperlessly with these two terrific tools, it took me a long time. Part of that was probably getting used to the tools, but part of it was also all the clicking and typing too. Now that Goobric automagically advances to the next student and I have gotten swifter at paperless grading, the extra time has been eliminated for me. With Goobric's new and better features, students can receive better, focused feedback for a learning advantage.