Grading Rubrics with Autocrat

In our classes, it often is pedagogically sound to use a rubric as a means for providing feedback to our students. And in order to aid us in using rubrics more efficiently, many of us have used rubrics in Schoology with success.

But one of the drawbacks? In Schoology, there isn’t a way to create a rubric that allows for free response feedback from the teacher. And that was a problem for +Britnee Ruscitti in her Acting classes. When evaluating student performance, Britnee wants the students to see their work on the rubric, but also wants to give them individual comments by means of “Keepers” (the really good stuff) and “Upgrades” (areas for improvement). While she has used Schoology rubrics in the past for her World Lit classes, she didn’t feel that they were appropriate to the needs of her Acting classes.

Enter Google Forms + Autocrat.

In order to more effectively use rubrics in her class, Britnee started by creating a Google Form. This form included:

• every student’s name
• every student’s email address
• a different multiple choice question for each rubric category
• two long answer questions for free response feedback
  

Example of a question

Long answer text questions

After Britnee created this Google Form, she needed to open the results in Google Sheets and install the add-on Autocrat. According to Google itself, Autocrat is a “Flexible, easy to use document merge tool that creates PDF or shared Documents from spreadsheet data.” Essentially, Autocrat takes all of the information from the Google Sheet and shares it with each student individually (which is why the Google Form includes each student’s name and email address).

This is what it looks like in class…

A student performs. Britnee watches and fills out the Google Form for each student including free response comments. After the student finishes performing, Britnee is able to immediately send the filled out rubric with Autocrat to each individual student. Boom. High-quality, timely feedback.

Screenshot of what a student receives from Britnee  

Britnee said that the two greatest reasons she chooses to use digital rubrics with Autocrat are a) it’s easier and faster for her to type her comments on her computer (as opposed to hand writing them) and b) it makes it so easy and fast to give the students the feedback.

On the downside, Britnee does readily admit that setting everything up the first time was a lot of work on the front end. See what you think. Here’s a tutorial on using Google Forms + Autocrat:

What’s next? Thinking about how to use the feedback on the rubrics to help students evaluate their longitudinal performance in order to create a growth mindset of their practice.

Is there a topic you’d like to see on the blog? Give us some ideas and let’s get the conversation started!