In the last few months a fair few new features have appeared and having just undertaken two rather significant blocks of marking, I thought it was worth reflecting on my experiences and uses of them. These are considered in no particular order.
Response column: This is a new feature in the assignment inbox which
shows if and when students have collected their feedback (image right). Of
course it can’t tell us if they’ve engaged with their feedback,
understood it and/or addressed it, but at least we now know if it’s been
collected. I’ve been amazed at how quickly students have accessed their
mark and feedback. For instance, a bunch of assignments were released
at 1pm today and by 1.05pm, eight students had collected their feedback.
Given I’d only sent the email alerting them to the release time having
been moved forward 15 minutes earlier, I was pretty amazed by this! I
checked an hour or so later and the number was up to 27 students:
roughly a third of the total.
Rubric viewer: In
the move to Turnitin 2, one of the things that a lot of people missed
was the ability to see the rubric clearly. The new version of the rubric
required you to mouse over each segment in order to see the words. A
recent adjustment means that with the click of a single button (the
four-arrow button in the image to the left) the whole rubric can be
opened out into a full view and can be moved to a second screen. I tend
to use two monitors (I dock my laptop to a screen whenever I can) so
I’ve now got into the habit of opening the rubric straight away and
moving it onto my second screen. This means I can adjust it as I go
rather than having to remember everything at the end of the paper. It
also means that you can put a lot more detail into the rubric segments
and still see it all clearly which is a vast improvement on the old view
of the rubric.Strike through: when you highlight text in the document viewer and click the ‘delete’ or ‘backspace’ key a red strike-through line appears. This is really handy for correcting spelling errors (I type the correct spelling above the word using Text Comment, but it’s also really useful to show students how they can simplify their language by eliminating unnecessary words or turns of phrase. I’ve done this several times with sentences or whole paragraphs and left a comment next to it saying to students that I have ‘deleted’ words to show how many unnecessary words they are using.
These three new features are pretty simple but I’ve been amazed at how quickly and easily I’ve been able to incorporate them into my marking practice.
