Grading assessments using Google Apps add-ons

One of the challenges of using technology for more formal and informal assessments is managing the grading portion. Even for quick form-driven assessment, grading can be difficult, and giving more meaningful, in-depth feedback can be extremely time-consuming.

Flubaroo is a Google Forms add-on that allows you to automatically grade Google Forms submissions, as either a formative or summative assessment. To get Flubaroo, go to a Google Form, click on add-ons and then go to "get add-ons". Once added, you'll go to add-ons to select and enable it for any form. When you are ready to grade, go to the form's "responses" spreadsheet. Then you can choose "grade assignment" to let Flubaroo work its magic.

You'll select a points value for each of the questions and an "answer key" which is usually the test that you take yourself.

Flubaroo will generate a second tab in the spreadsheet that lists each student's name, contact info, grade received and questions missed. You can even email grades to the students automatically. Pretty quick and easy! Several Homestead teachers are already using Flubaroo for grading Google Forms-based assessments.

For more involved feedback, as with essays and written work, there's Kaizena. Kaizena allows you to give verbal or written feedback on shared documents, grade some or all of student work using a rubric system and link to resources for students that need to re-learn or reinforce key concepts.

Kaizena is automatically enabled for our district; all you have to do is log in. You can create boxes for individual classes or assignments, and students can request feedback by sharing their documents with these boxes. I've included a short tutorial here:

Some teachers here are already using this very effectively. We'll be doing some Kaizena trainings later this year; let me know if you are interested!