Grademark's new features

One of the fantastic (albeit slightly unnerving) aspects of using Grademark to do my marking is that when new features are added, they simply ‘appear’ in the inbox of the document viewer, ready for me to use. I’m lucky in that I get alerts to some of these changes, but sometimes they feel like they’ve turned up unannounced. This is a great thing in that you always get the new features as soon as they are available without having to wait for an upgrade. But it can be, as I said, unnerving: especially if you are in the middle of conducting some training and there is a new feature there that you’ve not encountered before!
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.

Getting started with Grademark

Tabitha from Turnitin has just sent through this fantastic interactive guide to Grademark. This is a really handy tool for anyone who is keen to find out the basics of this tool.

grademark 1 from PlagiarismAdvice on Vimeo.
This is a screencast I've produced on my experiences of using Grademark focussing on the benefits it has brought to me, my students and my institution. 

Grademark Shortcuts

I’m in the middle of ploughing through around one hundred 2500 word essays using Grademark with a scored rubric to mark them. Along the way I’ve been searching out shortcuts to make things even quicker and I’ve found quite a few so I thought I’d share a few of them here.

1 Highlighting matched text in Grademark

This is the biggest and most important improvement in the new version of Turnitin and in itself is saving me around 3-4 minutes per essay. When you go into Grademark you can now select a button which highlights matched text in pale pink. As you read and mark the essay you can instantly dismiss passages of matched text which are properly referenced as you go. Given the vast majority of student essays contain no plagiarism at all, this means you only have to go back into the originality report for the essays which look dodgy.



In this image I’ve selected a section of a student's essay which includes the essay question which, of course, always comes up as matched and which I can, consequently, ignore each time. Unfortunately, when you open an essay in document viewer to mark it, it doesn’t default to this setting, so you have to get into the habit of turning it on with each essay you open. To do this, simply click in the darker grey button to the left of the Originality button on the top left hand corner of the screen.




2 – Quickmark Search Function

This has been a real breakthrough for me. The Quickmarks (QM) are great little timesavers in their own right, allowing me to basically ‘stamp’ aspects of the essay with rich comments for common problems. But sometimes it takes longer to find the right one than it would have taken to type it out in full. There is now a search function at the top of the Quickmark window which allows you to find the QM you’re looking for quickly and easily.

It searches both the name and the content of QMs, so searching for 'para' will bring up all the QMs with 'paragraph' in them. This has made my use of QMs feel faster and more fluid and I’m not using the pull down menus for QMs sets at all.

3 – Keystrokes for Saving Comments

When you add a QM to the essay it automatically saves it, but when you add a comment bubble you need to save it yourself. You can do this by using the mouse to click on the blue ‘save’ button but a quicker and more convenient way is to use the Tab key to select the ‘save’ button and then hitting return. By the time I’ve moved my hand back to the mouse, the Comment is saved and I’m ready to keep reading. If you hit the Tab key twice it selects the Cancel button and hitting it three times selects the ‘More Options’ link. This works also in the ‘General Comments’ window.

4 – Adding comments to Highlighted Passages

There are two ways you can connect a bubble comment to a specific section of text. You can highlight the text and then click on the ‘comment’ button at the top of the Quickmark window. Alternatively, you can click directly on the highlighted passage and it will open a Comment bubble for you. I find this second way quicker and more convenient than clicking the ‘comment’ button and appears in much the same way in the print-out version.


Find Out More


If you want to find out more about Grademark or Turnitin, there will be a free event prior to the JISC conference in Liverpool this year. To sign up, go to:


http://www.plagiarismadvice.org/component/content/article/38-frontpage/252-maximising-turnitin-grademark-peermark-and-new-features-

Grademark and eMarking

Glamorgan demo on Prezi

Turnitin2 - some first impressions.

As I’ve made clear in a previous blog post, I’m a fan of Turnitin and particularly the marking tool: GradeMark. After some shifting of dates, the long awaited upgrade, Turnitin 2, was launched on September 4^th. There’s never a good time for upgrades, but this one has come very close to the start of the academic year in Higher Education in the UK but at a time when not many people are doing any marking. Given I had three MA dissertations to mark, I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to give it a proper test run. So here are my first impressions of Turnitin2 – focusing particularly on the new version of GradeMark. I tried it in three browsers on two platforms:

• Firefox 3.6.9 on Mac OSX
• Safari 5.0.1 on Mac OSX
• Internet Explorer 8 on PC

First impressions

· The assignment inbox looks a lot cleaner and less cluttered: losing the column of red apples is a significant breakthrough.

· Grademark opens with a ‘getting started’ screen which offers some key tips for first-time users plus a link to a helpful 4-minute walkthrough which offers enough information to get started although it has the odd annoying typo in it.

· The quickmark comments have moved from the left hand side of the screen to the right which, as a right handed person, feels more intuitive to me, but cannot be moved so may make left handers grumpy.

· The use of screen ‘real estate’ is much better with a trimmed down header taking up much less room than previously and other useful stuff (such as the word count) tucked away in an information menu at the bottom left hand corner.

· The option to view originality within GradeMark is a real breakthrough. This alone, I estimate, will save me heaps of time as I can see quite easily where unoriginal text falls with respect to citations. This will save me having to go into each essay twice. It's done in a way which is unobtrustive so that it doesn’t get in the way of my reading and marking, but in any case is easy to turn on and off.

New things:

· There is a new ‘comments list’ view which lists comments made on the paper in a column on the right hand side of the screen. This should make it easier to navigate through the essay comment by comment – although the ‘show on paper’ link works haphazardly in all the browsers and platforms I tried.

· The comments look cleaner and less obtrusive as they sit in the paper as the icons are in blue and sit transparently behind the text. It’s still possible to highlight text and attach comments to it.

· It’s now considerably easier to add comments directly into my set of QuickMarks than previously. This will make a huge difference to academic staff coming to use it for the first time who often find that the process of setting up personal QuickMarks makes eMarking feel more rather than less time consuming. The time efficiencies don’t really kick in until your personal QuickMarks are built so making this process as quick and easy as possible is a big breakthrough.

Things I’ve not explored in depth yet:

· I’ve not yet used the rubrics, but I’ve heard on the grapevine that this has improved considerably. I’ll blog separately on that when I’ve had a chance to check it out.

· Also – I’ve not even started looking at PeerMark. Even though I’ve used it a few times now (in the old version) I was never confident I fully understood how it worked. I hope that the new version is more obvious and user-friendly. Again – I’ll blog about it when I get a change to explore it.

· On the Originality Report side of things, I’ve not done a huge amount with it yet, but my first impressions are that it now feels like the three different ways of viewing the reports have merged into one which most people should find easier to manage. It’s certainly a cleaner interface and it’s much easier to drill down into the matches than it was previously.

Things that have disappeared:

· The inbox still defaults to a hierarchy of originality reports – with the highest percentage at the top – but it’s no longer as clear that it can be ordered by author, title and date columns as there is nothing to distinguish the titles of these columns from those which can’t be ordered (grademark, file and paper ID).

· It’s now not possible to type words directly onto the paper (in the margins for instance). I didn’t use this much so won’t miss it a great deal, but I did find it handy to type the correct spelling on the top of misspelled words.

· It’s no longer possible to change the icons of comments (from the speech balloon to, for instance, a stop sign, a question mark or a tick). I used these quite a lot and it was good to be able to put ticks through an essay.

Having said all this – my overall impression on this first use of Grademark has been frustrating and disappointing. To put it simply – so much of it simply doesn’t work and it’s very, very buggy. There are some things which aren’t working on any browser:

· It’s not yet possible to print or download from Document Viewer (the new version). To do this you still have to go back to the previous version. The icon to do this is greyed out but recently an error message has been added which advises users to go to the old version.

· There is a tantalizing ‘time spent’ area on the information menu which, if it worked, could provide really useful information about how much time this tool is saving us – but it simply shows 00:00:00 and it’s not clear if I’m required to turn this feature on somewhere.

But there are things that aren’t working on some browsers.

· The ‘show on paper’ link in the Comments List, as I said, works haphazardly in some browsers or not at all in others. It’s potentially very useful – but only if it works.

· It’s not possible to highlight text to add a comment to it in Safari and difficult to highlight text in other browsers.

In Firefox in Mac, I repeatedly got the error message illustrated above when adding comments which required me to shut the essay down, open it up again and retype my comment. This happened around 15-20 times while marking a 10,000 word dissertation.

The overwhelming impression is that it’s very buggy and unstable which leads me to think that the launch has, as many suspected, been rushed and, as an end user, I’m doing beta testing for them. I’m now quite hesitant about running training sessions for staff on Turnitin2 until I have a clearer sense of if and when these bugs will be fixed.