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By Donna J. Oestreich-Hart
Greenville College
“I like everything about teaching, except grading papers!”
We’ve all said that at some time, right?
We make creative lessons plans, put on our best enthusiastic classroom
“face,” ask insightful questions and lead engaging class discussions, use
innovative technology, arrange field trips, invite students into our homes.
What more can we do to do our jobs well?
Well. . . . We can give
rigorous tests and assign rigorous essays, grade them thoughtfully, and get them
back to students in a timely manner so that they can learn from rapid and
frequent feedback. But how do we do
that without spending literally every waking moment doing something that has to
do with “school”? I, for one,
teach at an institution that is very “college-community” oriented.
It would be easy to be doing something with fellow faculty members or
with students every day and evening of every week.
That has an up side and a down side.
I want a LIFE outside my academic life.
Finding some way to speed up at least this one aspect of my
profession—the grading of student papers—would be a real benefit.
At Greenville College, we’ve been teaching our
freshman composition classes in a computer lab since 1991.
Over the last decade, we’ve increasingly moved students into a
paperless environment. By that, I
mean that we set up all classroom assignments electronically, either through a
combination of our webpages and email or through a course management program,
such as Norton’s Connect.net or Blackboard.
Our assignments go out to students electronically, they submit papers to
us electronically, and we grade them and return them electronically.
Our early efforts at grading student papers online were only marginally
better than grading by hand (sometimes there is so MUCH advice to give!).
And we found ourselves saying the same kinds of things over and over,
typing them over and over. Why, we wondered, if there were a fairly small number of
comments that we found ourselves making all the time, why could we not figure
out how to insert those comments with just a click of a button? A macro. In
fact, in recent years, we have developed a set of grading macros that allow us
to say more to our students about their papers and to do it with less
effort and time. The purpose of
this article is to tell you how we do that and encourage you to create your own
set of grading macros that will address your particular class needs—and save
you some time.1
First,
you will need to create a new toolbar that will house only your grading macros.
Microsoft Word operates several built-in toolbars, two of which you see
as defaults when you open the Word program:
The Standard toolbar (Open, Save, Print, etc.) and the Formatting
toolbar (Bold, Italic, Underline, Align Left, etc.). Open Microsoft Word and open some kind of “practice”
document—something with text, but not something that is crucially important.2
You will need this
practice document for several procedures before we’re finished.
You can leave it open and simply work over the top of it.
Now,
click on Tools and Customize.3
When the Customize box appears, be sure that the menu you’re
looking at is the Toolbars menu; if not, click on the tab to bring it to
the front. Among your options on
the right of the screen will be New... .
Click on that. When the
additional New Toolbar screen appears, name your toolbar Grading
Macros, make it available to Normal.dot, and close out all the
overlying screens (not your “practice” paper).
Now you’re ready to actually create those macros to say what you want
to say to students.
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Check
to make sure that your Grading Macros Toolbar is visible as a bar across
the top of your screen. It will
probably appear as just an empty bar space right now, because we haven’t put
anything in it. We’re going to
need to “drag” some things up there as we create the new macros.
If it isn’t visible, click on View, Toolbars, and select
the Grading Macros from the list.
To create your first macro, go first to your
“practice” text and highlight a few words, perhaps half a dozen.
You are doing this because you want to prepare each macro, once you
create it, to recognize highlighted student text about which you want to
comment. You won’t easily be able
to highlight any text once you open the macro program, so do it now.
Now click on Tools, Macro, and Record New Macro.
Name your macro under Macro name:.
For example, you may want to speak to students about SubjectVerbAgreement.
Name your macro that—no spaces in the name.
Then select Toolbars. At
this point, a Customize box should appear.
Select the Commands tab, where you will see Categories:
and Macros on the left side and Commands: and Normal.NewMacros.SubjectVerbAgreement (or
whatever you name your macro) with a three-pronged icon on the right.
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Left-click
on the icon/name and drag it up into the Grading Macros Toolbar at the top of
your screen. Once you see it in the
toolbar, it will change to an “I-beam,” so you can see where in the toolbar
you want to place it. When you
release the mouse, the macro name will appear in the toolbar as a black-bordered
box, with only the macro name in it. We
will change that later.
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But
first, we need to finish recording the macro.
Click on Close, and you will then see a small Stop box
appear with a cassette tape icon that moves with your cursor.
These two visuals tell you that your macro program is recording
absolutely everything you do. So if you make a mistake, it’s recorded.
Don’t worry; we can go back and clean up mistakes later through Visual
Basic Editor.
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Now
we need to go back to your highlighted “practice” text.
We are ready to attach a comment to it.
Remember, the macro is recording everything you type, so think
about what you want to say before you type it.
Click on Insert (top of your screen) and Comment.
In the new split screen at the bottom of your screen, type what you want
your students to know about Subject-Verb Agreement, perhaps something like
“Your subject and verb do not agree in this sentence. Give singular subjects a singular verb and plural subjects a
plural verb.” You might even want
to refer them to a specific chapter and page in their composition handbooks.
Then close out the split screen.
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At
this point, you may want to add some visual identifier so that the student will
immediately recognize what your comment is about. Remember, you’re still recording.
With your cursor at the end of your highlighted passage, type, in bold
and ALL CAPS, some brief identifier, perhaps SV.
Then hold down the Shift-key and use your “arrow keys” to highlight
the SV. Finally, choose the Highlight
icon from your toolbar above (next to Font color) and select a color with
which you want to envelop those letters.
Now
you are finished recording the macro. Click
on the Stop button and close out the small macro recording box.
Of course, you don’t want all your grading macros
to be just text buttons. Not only
would they take up too much space on your toolbar and as you use them, but they
would also just blend in too much with the text that your student already has in
the paper you’re grading. So it would be better if your macros were more like symbols,
something small, preferably colored, something that would immediately stand out
from the rest of the text. So
let’s call up the text name button and edit it.
Click on Tools and Customize.
Once that screen is open, right-click on the text button you want to
edit. When a drop menu appears
below your text button, select Default Style.
Your default will make the text in the button disappear and an icon take
its place. The default icon will
probably be that three-pronged figure that you saw when you first named the
macro. You now have at least two
options:
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1)
Right-click on the default icon itself.
You can choose Change Button Image, in which case another screen
of images will pop up, and you can select one of those to take the place of the
default icon image. In fact, if you
have a collection of downloaded icon images, you could call up and select one of
those. Otherwise, choose from the
small set that is already housed in MS Word and which appears onscreen.
2)
Or you can choose Edit Button Image, in which case an enlarged
version of your button will appear, and you can make its picture be whatever you
want by clicking on Clear to clean off everything that’s already there
and then clicking on the color palette to the right and “drawing” the
picture you want by filling in the small squares of the enlarged version.
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Whichever you choose, click OK when you’re finished.
Test your grading macro by highlighting some other section of your
“practice” text and clicking on the new macro icon from the grading toolbar. If all has gone well, the highlighted text should appear in a
yellow box, and your grading macro icon button should appear at the end of the
text. Then, when you run your
cursor over the highlighted text, the inserted comment should appear in a white
box. That is what your students
will see as they read the paper you have graded and returned.
You can say as much or as little as you want to the student in the
comment box. Below, you will see my
current set of grading macros, many of which you’ll be able to figure out for
yourself.
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When the students read their returned paper, they will not only see the
initial colored buttons and/or highlighted passages throughout their paper, but
they will also be able to engage in a “conversation” with you as they move
their cursor over those highlighted passages and read your encouragements or
advice. Finally, they will be able
to print out both the graded paper and a separate sheet of your comments, which
should help them in any revisions you require.
At Greenville College, as I said earlier, we
initially found that grading papers with these macros took about as long as if
we had hand-written the comments. But
as we became accustomed to the system, we found that we could still give much
more helpful advice and do so in less time, leaving more time, of course, for
our other lives.
Notes
1I
confess, at the very outset, that I am not the one who originally created this
set of macros. The salvos for that
go to Dr. S. Bradley Shaw, formerly our English Department Chair.
However, I taught myself the basic instructions for these processes by
following the online instructions at http://businesssoft.about.com
and http://support.microsoft.com .
And I badgered and cajoled my “tech” friends at Greenville College to
answer my many, many questions and to show me repeatedly how to do things.
Consequently, many thanks to student Christian Wyglendowski and to
Professors Brad Shaw and Deloy Cole.
2Frankly,
I don’t know whether you can do this same process through other Office
programs or not. Experiment on your
own and see. A lot of what I’ve
learned has resulted from just fooling around with my laptop in the evenings in
front of the TV—instead of crocheting or something.
But everything I will describe will operate through MS Word.
3You
can also go through View, Toolbars, and Customize.
