Moving toward paperless assessment

My faculty and I have run a School to Work assessment task over the past few years where students apply for fictional jobs as real world practice for when they have to look for real world work. Application letters, resumes and real interviews form the components of the task.

The Task

Up to now, the students submit their task on paper. With the advent of the Digital Education Revolution laptops, we decided to transform the work that the students did from fully paper based to as paperless as we could manage.

We had to consider what would make the task “work” for the students, and what would be relatively simple to mark electronically. We had a Moodle platform to deploy from, but had found that the students needed more developlment in its use before it could be reliably used.

We decided to use Adobe portfolios to create a “kit” that would contain the resources needed by the students to complete the task. The kit was to include templates of application letters and resumes that the students could draft their own from, and then submit the final product to their teacher. The templates included PDF’s , and “Live Forms” created with Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 Extended or Adobe LiveCycle, Rich Text and Word documents.

The “kit” was deployed via the NSW Department of Education & Training (DET) internal email system. Every student in our Yr10 cohort received an email from me with the kit as an attachment. They then downloaded the kit to the hard drive of their DER laptop.

The students then had class time and time at home to produce the application letter and resume. They were then submitted by the due date to their class teacher, using the DET email system.

Marking

Marking and feedback will be completed electronically using features in  Adobe Acrobat that include sticky notes. This document will be returned to the students, and they will add it to a digital porfolio they are compiling for their final assessment.

While we have to overcome hurdles in making this work, including staff familiarity with software and general tech competence as well as  student upskilling with  unfamiliar software, the encouraging aspects are that staff see the exercise as a worthwhile use of the new laptop resources. Student enthusiasm for e-assessment has not always been as obvious, but the genuine support of the staff has seen some shift in this attitude.

POSTSCRIPT

The due date for the task was today. We worried that the number of submissions about 3 days out from the due date was very low. However, on the due date, we estimated we had around 80 -90% of students submit their tasks. This is probably a combination of factors – the consistency of “message” that the deadline had to be met (reinforced by all staff), along with the expectation that all submissions were to be electronic. We accepted paper submissions (for equity reasons), but the non electronic submission rate was pleasingly low.

Link to the Portfolio is here (you will need Adobe Acrobat 9 Extended Pro to fully appreciate the effect)

I want to acknowledge the pride I have for my faculty in undertaking this potentially risky venture – their support and willingness to try something new has been awesome. Thank You!

The caveat with sharing a resource like this is that some people will find the task less than perfect, but we think we are progressing toward making more of our assessment material paperless. And I like that thought.

Going paperless

One of my dreams, right from the start of my journey with technology, is that one day I could eliminate paper entirely from my job. Pipedream….perhaps, and up to now I’d never quite cracked a method that would allow the dream to become reality.

Recently, I was helping out at a Moodle workshop and I was shown a method that may head me closer toward the paperless classroom. It includes using Moodle, a photocopier that can scan documents into PDF format, and Microsoft OneNote. It’s funny how all these conditions suddenly coalesced one day, not only in my thinking, but also in reality.

One of the biggest spends at my school is the printing of coursework booklets for students. Just about every faculty prints booklets that contain “learning” activities. I could spend a whole blog post discussing the merits (or otherwise) of these booklets, but that’s for another day. A guestimate from my boss was that we spend $20K+ on printing costs each year! Imagine what you could spend that sort of cash on, rather than on “one use” booklets that inevitably get tossed away at the end of each semester.

So what if we could make the use of these booklets electronic in nature? The obvious question was how do you make the electronic version editable to the extent that students could submit work, without having to print out pages, write on them and hand them in? That would just defeat the purpose of trying to go paperless.

So, in a wonderful combination of serendipity and old fashioned professional networking I have a potentially workable solution to play with. I have to thank Pam from Newcastle High for her insights in showing it to me.

Firstly, my target group. In my case, the participants will by our Year 10 (2010) students, who will have their DERvices (netbooks) and will hopefully, by then, will be skilled in the use of them. These netbooks have Adobe PDF readers and creators and OneNote preinstalled, making the whole process possible.

OK..here’s how it works.

Take your paper version of your booklet. Stick it through your photocopier, so it produces a complete PDF copy (in my case 40 pages). Upload the PDF booklet to your Moodle course, and make it available as a resource file. At the same time, create an “Upload one file” assignment activity that is named after the worksheet, or whatever, and put it in the same area as the booklet PDF.

Now, in class, when you want to use a resource or activity that is in the booklet, the kids can open the PDF booklet to the required page. Select the page for printing, but instead of printing it to paper, in the print dialogue window, select “Print to OneNote”. The page selected will now appear in a OneNote notebook. For those that know OneNote well, you know you can click and type anywhere on the page. In this case, the kids can click and type anywhere on the selected page imported from the PDF booklet. The kids can now do their work on the page, and when they finish, save it as a PDF file on their PC.

They head to Moodle, and upload their work as a PDF to the assignment activity. The teacher can open the file, grade the work and feedback to the kids….without touching one piece of paper! Samples of student work can be collected and presented electronically as an ePortfolio, without carting folders, books or paper to your Head Teacher or Principal.

Sure there will probably be limitations that don’t suit everyone’s workplace, but I my humble opinion, it’s a right step in an exciting direction.