Tag Archives: iPad

Digital Grading Follow-Up

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THE BACKGROUND
Back in March, I wrote a post called “Want Some Free Red Pens?” on my dream for digital exam grading. In my ideal world, I’d remove all the paper from my office entirely. Having only digital copies of exams would be splendid since I could get a lovely potted plant to put in place of my institutional-looking filing cabinet. Last semester, I did accomplish my goal of grading an entire set of exams without using any non-digital ink. Now I finally have the time to tell you how it went.

The exam was for our “Introductory Calculus” (MATH 120) course. It was the third exam of the semester and I had about 30 students enrolled. I gave the same exam I would have otherwise — it wasn’t an online test. If you’re really interested, you can find a copy of the test here. I photocopied it like usual, and my students took it like usual. I did choose 1-sided copies over my usual preference for double-sided to help with the scanning task.

THE PROCESS

  1. Write, photocopy, proctor, collect exam. Alphabetize exams by student lastname and remove staple.
  2. Scan exams to PDF files using department’s Xerox machine; export as e-mail attachment to myself.
  3. Use husband’s perl script to “pull apart” multi-exam PDF file into 7-page segments. Rename files “lastname-exam3.pdf”. Transfer each file to iPad and open in GoodNotes.
  4. Correct each exam, save graded copy as “lastname-exam3-done.pdf”, compile exam grades, and upload grades onto our LMS.
  5. Use LaTeX’s “pdfpages” package to combine each annotated exam with a very thorough “Solution Key” (with comments, hints, suggestions, etc) at the end. Send each student an e-mail containing their exam’s feedback with the Solution Key & notification that official exam grade is available on LMS. [This was done to avoid FERPA issues about sending graded assignments, or grades themselves, over e-mail.]
  6. Save un-graded exams in my filing cabinet in case any student wants to pick theirs up. (As it turned out, no one did.)

THE GOOD THINGS
Here are the things I did like:

  • No crayon marks! No spilled orange juice! No paper shuffling! No page flipping! No running out of ink! Grading at home with a toddler is a tedious process, but being able to get in eight minutes of grading while also providing parental supervision was fantastic.
  • Forced Solutions. By giving every student a full Solution Key, I was able to write things like “See Remark on page 5” instead of re-writing the same paragraph of comments over and over again. Also, I didn’t have to feel guilty about printing thirty copies of said Solution Key, and I knew each and every student had been given the chance to see the solutions. (Usually, I upload the Solution Key to our LMS, but not every student bothers reading it, which is weird.)
  • Grading was Fast! During the “active grading” phase, I think it went faster than grading on paper. I didn’t have to spend time turning pages. I could Copy-and-Paste similar remarks from one test onto a different test. Because I didn’t need as much physical desk space to spread out, I was able to get in five minutes of grading here, four minutes of grading there, and so forth, so I think I was able to return the exams sooner than I would have otherwise.

THINGS NEEDING IMPROVEMENT

  • Hello, Copy Room. With about thirty students and a 7-page exam, the scanning task involved around 200 pages. It turns out that our Xerox machine does not like it when you ask it to scan anywhere near this many pages at once. After trying to scan 8 exams at once (56 pages), the Xerox’s “brain” would get hung up mid-process and a machine reboot was necessary. After this happened twice, I realized that I could only really scan 28-pages at once. So I set up four exams, pressed “SCAN”, and waited three minutes; lather, rinse, repeat. Four exams taking three scanning minutes meant about half an hour in the Copy Room I would have liked to spend elsewhere. (Thankfully, this wasn’t a total time loss since I could work on other tasks while the copy machine whirred.)

    A colleague let me know that elsewhere on campus, there exists a better copy machine that could handle this type of task more easily. But, accounting for walking to-and-from time, I am not sure this would have taken any less than thirty minutes anyhow.

  • Returning Exams. It had been my plan to use the LMS’s “Dropbox” functionality to return the exams. Unfortunately, I lost over an hour of my life trying to get this to work — without any success whatsoever. We use a Desire2Learn product, and after consulting back-and-forth with my Instructional Technologist, we concluded that you cannot return graded work unless a student has submitted ungraded work first.

    In other words, there is no way for me to return a PDF file to a student unless and until they have uploaded a (potentially blank) PDF file to me. So, basically, there is a way to “reply” to an uploaded student document, but there is no way for me to “send” a student an uploaded document first.

  • Big File Sizes. One has to be careful about writing too many GoodNotes comments. GoodNotes didn’t do a great job of compressing the PDF file size, and our LMS refused to allow me to send any file over 2MB in size as an e-mail attachment. Some of the exams were over this limit (too many comments) and others weren’t. To be fair, I am not sure if this is more annoying because of GoodNotes or more annoying because of our LMS. I also don’t know if GoodNotes has gotten better at saving from a GoodNotes document to an annotated PDF and keeping the file size smaller.

CONCLUSION

In the end, I don’t know if I’ll try this process again anytime soon. The biggest time drainers were the Xerox scanning & learning what didn’t work. If I were to do this again, I might investigate a better scanning technology. I would certainly ask my students to submit a blank PDF file to the LMS Dropbox, so I could “grade it” and instead return to them their graded test papers. My students really liked having a digital copy of their tests — it meant that when final exam week rolled around, they didn’t have to dig through their course materials to find their test. So, maybe I will revisit this idea sometime in the future? I’ll let you know if I do.

Digital Plan for Digital Action

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It turns out that several people had some great suggestions about my wish for digital exam grading. I’ve decided to attempt it for my next Calculus exam, scheduled for Tuesday, March 26th. Here’s an outline of the plan:

  1. Photocopy exams single-sided and unstapled. Place a copy of each exam into an empty file folder.
  2. Subject unsuspecting Calculus students to grueling exam on these topics: Related Rates; Linear Approximation; Mean Value Theorem; Derivatives and Graphs.
  3. Alphabetize exams as they are turned in according to course roster. For absent students, place blank exam where theirs should be.
  4. Use department copy machine to scan all ~350 pages to a single PDF file and send it to me via e-mail.
  5. Thank my husband profusely for writing pdftk bash script that will take the single PDF file and break it apart, at every ~9th page, and rename the files according to last name (keeping alphabetical order in place). If this works, I should end up with 36 PDF files where each student has a file called “Owens-Calculus-Exam3.pdf” or something similar.
  6. Create Dropbox folders for the ungraded exam PDFs and the graded exam PDFs. Use GoodNotes to grade the exams on my iPad. Export the finished product back to Dropbox.
  7. Disseminate graded exams and grades to students.

It’s likely my first attempt at this will take longer than nondigital grading. One of the things I will have to do as I go is come up with “Correction JPGs” for those errors that happen most frequently and store them somewhere on Dropbox. I think these should be easy to add to each exam using the “import JPG” feature of GoodNotes. Usually I estimate that grading will take no longer than 10 minutes per exam. For my 36 calculus students, this means regular grading should take me about six hours. Hopefully this digital grading effort won’t take too much longer than this.

For Step 7, I also need to find out about FERPA. Provided I have a “sign for consent” on my exam header page, is that enough for it to be okay for me to e-mail each student her graded exam? Alternatively, is there a way using our Desire2Learn-Dropbox (on our Learning Management System) to return the exams to the students in some easy way?

Wish me luck!

Want Some Free Red Pens?

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I’m about 75% through this round of midterm exam grading. Overall, I’m down to around 100 students in total, over three classes. I’ll give four midterm exams and a final exam at the end of the semester. This requires a lot of red ink.

A while ago, I read an inspiring article in the MAA FOCUS called “Abandon the Red Pen!” written by Maria H. Andersen. The article was about digital grading. Since I read it, digital grading has been a dream of mine. Ideally, here’s what I’d like to do with the pile of exams currently sitting on my dining room table:

  1. Students take exams in class, on paper, like usual.
  2. After students turn in exams, magic happens. I end up having a PDF file of each individual exam paper, titled something like “StudentLastName-Calculus-Exam2.pdf”
  3. I dump all of the PDF files into a Dropbox folder and then I do all of the exam grading on my iPad.
  4. Once I’m done, I save each file as “StudentLastName-Calculus-Exam2Graded.pdf” and then more magic happens, and each student gains access to their graded exam — perhaps over e-mail, or through the file server in our Learning Management System, or some other solution.

Overlooking the requisite magic requirements, let me explain why I’d prefer this to offline grading:

  • I wouldn’t have to carry 100 exams home, keep them away from my toddler, make sure I don’t lose any to black hole of my desk, try to avoid spilling coffee on them, etc.
  • I would have a complete digital record of a student’s work. Occasionally a student comes to me at the end of the course and says, “I just checked the online gradebook. It says I earned grade X%, but I am certain I earned grade (X+4)%.” Sometimes they are able to produce the test paper and the gradebook indeed has an error. Sometimes they aren’t able to produce the test paper, and I can’t do anything for the student. Having a digital PDF file of every graded exam would solve this issue immediately.
  • In the unfortunate case of dishonest work, I would have a clear record. (For instance, if a student modifies their test paper after it is graded and returned, and then asks for more credit on a problem. This has happened in the past.)

But the most important reason I’d love to switch to digital exam grading is that I could give better comments in less time. On the current test, all students had to solve a similar “Optimization” problem involving having a constrained amount of fencing to build a backyard of area A. For the most part, students fell into one of three categories: (A) Response entirely correct; (B) Response entirely incorrect or missing or blank; or (C) Response partially correct, but some errors were made. In category (C), there were only about three types of errors: That is, everyone who made a mistake made one of the same three mistakes.

Digital grading would allow me to type up a full response as to what the error was, why it was not correct, and how to fix it. I would only have to type the response once. I could save it as a JPG file. Then whenever a student made that particular error, I could just “drag and drop” the response onto their test paper.

Also, eventually I’d have JPG stamps for the big “Top 100 Algebra Errors”, things like sqrt(9+16) is not the same as sqrt(9)+sqrt(16). I would never have to write anything about this mistake again because I could just drag and drop the explanation JPG!

Now, the tricky part: How do I get the magic to happen? The photocopy machine in my department is quite happy to take 8 pages, scan them to a PDF, and e-mail them to me. So, for a particular student’s exam, I could undo the staple, run it through the copy machine, and I’d be done. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do this en masse very efficiently.

Suppose I have 100 exam papers, each 8-10 pages. How do I remove all of the staples, run each one through the copy machine individually, and rename the files? This process seems very easy, but I estimate it would take about a minute per exam. At this point, I’d rather spend 100 minutes doing the grading than 100 minutes dealing with the paper shuffle. Hence I need magical elves. Or graduate students.

Since I haven’t figured out how to do this first step, I haven’t given much thought as to how to “hand back” the graded files. I’m sure there’s probably some easy way to do this in our LMS, so maybe it wouldn’t even require magic.

Do you have any ideas about how to do the first step (i.e., scan each individual exam paper to PDF) that doesn’t require magic, graduate students, or administrative assistants? I’m happy to send you all my red pens in trade for such information.

LaTeX and the iPad

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I’ve been lecturing on my iPad for a little over a year now. If you’d like some information about which apps I use during my class, check out my previous blog post on that topic. One of the projects I’ve been working on this semester is converting my lecture notes into LaTeX. This has been a time-consuming task; my Precalculus notes, for instance, compiled to over 150 typed pages.

Here’s a current version of my lecture notes for Stewart’s calculus book on “The Chain Rule”: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j12ie3tnooluiyd/120-ch3s04.pdf (This is what my students will print and bring to class. I project the blank PDF and write on my iPad with a stylus.)

One of the things I was interested in having was a way to create, edit, and compile LaTeX documents on the iPad itself. Our “Teaching, Learning, and Technology” division offers mini-grants for technology-related things that cost a small amount of money ($5-$200). Last semester I applied for and received a grant for an iPad keyboard ($85) and an app called TexWriter ($8.99).

I like the Logitech keyboard. I haven’t had any problems getting it to find its Bluetooth connection to my iPad. There are only two minor annoyances when it comes to writing in LaTeX with this keyboard: (1) The “Backspace” key is really tiny, and (2) the smallest key on the keyboard is “\”, practically the most commonly used non-letter key in any LaTeX document. Here’s a photograph of the keyboard to see what I mean:

In my office, I have used the collaborative, online LaTeX editor writeLaTeX (https://www.writelatex.com/) on my computer. One of the great things about it is that it automatically saves your document to the cloud, meaning it is easily accessible from anything with a live internet connection (like my iPad). It compiles fairly quickly and easily and doesn’t require downloading any software. Screenshot:

But it does need an internet connection. Since my iPad is only a “WiFi” model, there are lots of times I would like to be working when I might not have internet access (like on an airplane trip). Also, the site seems a bit touchy when it comes to my iPad keyboard. For instance, I couldn’t figure out a way to use the “Copy and Paste” iPad commands, and I had some difficulties with the keyboard’s arrow keys when it came to navigating documents.

Meanwhile, TeXWriter seems to work fine with my iPad keyboard. The files sync with Dropbox, although not as smoothly as other apps I’ve used. Files created in TeXWriter are synced to a particular Dropbox folder (something like Dropbox/Apps/TeXWriter/index/) and there isn’t an easy way to put this file in one folder and the next file in a different folder. Here’s what TeXWriter looks like:

 

So, in the end, I can’t give a glowing review of either LaTeX-on-iPad solution I’ve found. I had troubles compiling on both TeXWriter and writeLaTeX, probably because I was using lots of packages (tikz, multicol, fancybox, hyperref, …) and didn’t take the time to set either account up properly. In the end, it was just much faster to return to my comfortable office and WinEdt setup.

The time I did use TeXWriter for over an hour (give or take) was during some exam proctoring. I could edit a Dropbox-stored LaTeX document between laps around the classroom. I’m not sure I’d fork over $10 for the app, but it is useful.

It would be lovely if I could try out the other LaTeX apps in the iTunes store before making a purchase. This is the type of application that you really need to have a trial period to see if it will function the way you want! Several of the other LaTeX apps are “expensive” — given that I’m accustomed to most apps being $0.99, thinking about purchasing a $5.99 app “on a whim” seems like a giant financial investment!

Do you know of any great LaTeX/iPad solutions? I’d love to know about them.

Making Twitter Useful at Work

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Following the FTI last May, I focused my Twitter account on feeds relevant to my professional life. I am still trying to figure out exactly what “professional” in this context means — right now, basically it means, “Stuff I like reading on Twitter while I’m at work.” Here are some “people” I follow:

But the most useful part of Twitter has been connecting with other math professors and math educators. I’ve found out about really fantastic resources from them, and I have no idea how I’d ever learn about things without them.

Great things I learned about via Twitter:

  1. The open-source graphing plotter “Graph”: http://www.padowan.dk/
  2. This open-source, free, activity-based calculus book: http://opencalculus.wordpress.com/
  3. How to do Origami in Geogebra: http://www.geogebratube.org/material/show/id/883
  4. Why we need more women math majors: http://kinlin.com/blog/2012/09/why-we-need-more-women-math-majors/
  5. The Wolfram|Alpha Chrome extension: http://wolframalpha.tumblr.com/post/33907023300/download-the-wolfram-alpha-chrome-extension
  6. The QAMA Calculator that now sits on my desk: http://qamacalculator.com/
  7. Everything written in Casting Out 9s is fantastic: http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/
  8. GVSU’s Screencast channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/GVSUmath/videos?view=1

iPad in the Classroom

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Introduction

Here at the College, one of the subgroups of the IT Department is TLT: “Teaching, Learning and Technology.” Check them out on Twitter: @TLTCofC! For a full list of their programs, check out their blog at http://blogs.charleston.edu/tlt/. One of their functions is to offer equipment check-out for staff and faculty at the College. Last semester (Spring 2012) I was able to check out an iPad 2 from early February through the end of final exams. I was teaching three sections of our 3-credit “Elementary Statistics” course (MATH104) and one section of our 3-credit “Linear Algebra” course (MATH203). I abandoned the use of chalk boards in favor of lecturing on the iPad.

My Pre-iPad Lectures

For the last few years, I moved to using ELMO-style document cameras instead of board-based lectures. Originally I made this swap because the particular classroom where I had been assigned had a only tiny blackboard and I realized I would spend half of the class time erasing the board. But after a couple weeks of ELMO use, I was a big fan. Instead of presenting material while facing away from the students, writing on blank paper using pens under the ELMO camera allowed me to face the students for the entire class period. Doing this enabled me to catch many “I’m confused!” facial expressions from students who may not have felt comfortable voicing their concerns. Also, I was able to keep track of exactly what we had completed in any given class period since every day I walked out of the classroom with a written record of what we had done. It turns out that the ELMO cameras are going out of favor. I think this is because of the cost versus use computation done by the people in charge of budget decisions (but I’m not entirely sure). The iPad was the natural place to end up.

What I Do Now

As my class prep, I produce PDF files of class lecture notes for all of my courses. I upload the PDF files to our learning management system (called OAKS at the College of Charleston). My students can access the files on a password protected site. I don’t require my students to print out the notes, but I’d say about 95% of my students do print the notes and bring them to class because they find them useful.

Meanwhile, I load the PDFs onto my iPad and then project them in the classroom. I use a stylus to annotate the notes and my students write on their printed copies. The best app I’ve found for this purpose is GoodNotes. Currently I am using a Bamboo Stylus, which isn’t perfect but works well enough.

I have found it useful to name my PDF files like this: 104-ch7s123.pdf The “104” designates the course and “ch7s123” means these notes cover Chapter 7, Sections 1, 2, and 3. Last semester when I was teaching three different sections of the same course, I made three copies of each PDF file in GoodNotes and named them 104-ch7s123-05.pdf, 104-ch7s123-12.pdf, and 104-ch7s123-14.pdf for sections 05, 12, and 14. This helped since sometimes the classes wouldn’t be on exactly the same problem and each class I could re-load exactly where we had been the day before.

I hope the information below will help!

Hardware and Classroom Requirements

Classroom requirements:

  • A digital projector and a screen
  • VGA-in connection
  • A desk

To bring to class:

  • An iPad. I am now using a college-owned iPad3.
  •  My stylus
  • A dongle — It connects the iPad to the VGA input for the projector

Useful Apps

  1. Dropbox (Free)iTunes Store: http://itunes.apple.com/app/dropbox/id327630330

    Website: https://www.dropbox.com/

    Dropbox makes it easy to sync files across different computers (and the iPad). They have a free desktop application that installs as a directory, something akin toC:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\Dropbox

    which allows for easy “drag and drop” functionality as well as the ability to save files directly to your Dropbox. You can also share your Dropbox (or just part of it) with other people by extending them an e‑mail invite. Good reasons to consider this would be sharing course materials among colleagues teaching the same class, or to store joint files produced during collaborative research. The “Basic” service is free and gives 2GB of space. You can upgrade Dropbox to 50GB ($99/year) or 100GB ($200/year).

  2. GoodNotes (Free; or Paid version $3.99)iTunes Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/goodnotes-notes-pdf/id424587621

    Website: http://goodnotesapp.com/

    The best feature of GoodNotes is that it behaves well with the projector. The projector will display only the PDF file and not all of the annotation features. (That way, my students don’t see me messing around with choosing different pen colors or highlighter widths.)

    GoodNotes easily syncs with Dropbox, which makes moving files from where I produce my notes (my computer in my office) to where I need them (my iPad in the classroom) simple.Another feature that makes GoodNotes great is the little “write here” box at the bottom of the screen. This allows me to write using big lettering, but it appears as a normal size on the screen. Writing in 12pt font using a stylus can be a bit tricky. In essence, what the “write here” box allows you to do is to write in 48pt handwriting but have it appear like you’re writing in 12pt handwriting instead.

    As an aside, a recent version of GoodNotes had an unhappy bug where all files would appear blurry when projected. This was a bummer for my class that day! I contacted GoodNotes customer support and they got back to me in eight minutes! That was amazingly fast and I was impressed. They knew of the problem and fixed it within a couple of hours, and took the time to update me about how it was going. Thanks, @GoodNotesApp!

  3. CourseSmart (Free)

    iTunes Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/etextbooks-for-the-ipad/id364903557

    Website:http://www.coursesmart.com/

    CourseSmart is an eBook subscription service. Digital textbooks can be rented for 180 days. As an instructor, you can get free subscriptions to most textbooks. You will need a CourseSmart account. If you have used any other digital Pearson product (e.g., MyMathLab, MyStatLab, MathXL) your same login information should work on CourseSmart. If not, you can register as an Instructor here. You need to register from a computer (not a mobile device). Once you register, you can add different books to your eBookshelf. Once books have been added, the CourseSmart iPad app will allow you to access them. You can browse through them, flip to a particular (printed) page, take digital notes in the margins, put a “sticky note” down on a page, etc.

    CourseSmart is a great tool to avoid bringing the textbook with you to class every day. I have found this app useful in cases where a student will ask during class about a particular homework problem, or in-text Example.

    I have many books in my eBookshelf. I have several “Elementary Statistics” textbooks to browse through when I need more example problems, project ideas, etc. This is the digital solution to having bookshelves in my office with thousands of pounds of textbooks I don’t need.

    The one downside of the CourseSmart app is you need a live internet connection. On the “Wireless only” iPads, this means you can only access the textbooks while you have a wireless internet connection. So if you were hoping to read the Linear Algebra textbook while on a flight, this won’t work.

    Students can download the CourseSmart app and purchase a digital textbook subscription. Here is a pricing comparision for “Elementary Statistics (11th ed.)” by Triola.

    MSRP:  $160.00 (new book)

    Amazon:  $125 (new book with MyMathLab), $115 (new book), $75(used book)

    CourseSmart:  $63.99                                   (eBook)

    MyStatLab with eBook:  $82.00               (eBook + online homework)