Marking and/or Giving Feedback with Turn-It-In's Grademark

Adapted from a guide created by Rob Shaw

Introduction

Turn-It-In is a web based service which integrates into the university VLE. It performs two main functions: the generation of originality reports for students' written work and tools for helping tutors to grade and provide feedback on written work. This document concentrates on the second of these two. The tool is presented here from the point of view of a participating tutor and so the setting up and configuration of Grademark is not treated - just the tutor's view of an existing and properly configured student assignment in box.

What do you need? Just an Internet connection and a web browser that passes X-Stream's compatibility test. You do not need Microsoft Office or any other type of word processor. This is because the work students submit is processed and converted into a web friendly format automatically.

Getting In

• Navigate into the X-Stream module in which you have been asked to mark student work.
• Select the Teach tab if not already selected. (The Build tab is needed to set up a new assignment for students and for Turn-It-In the Student tab does not give a true picture of how the assignment looks to an actual student.)
• In the course content navigate to the location you have been directed to. An in box for a particular student assignment will be represented by an icon with a suitable title and optionally some descriptive text chosen by the module leader.
• Click on the icon.

In the middle of the page you will see something similar to this:

The column labeled grademark indicates the status of each student's work.

• Blank: No work submitted.
• Grey apple: Work submitted but not yet processed and ready to view.
• Red apple: Work submitted, processed and ready for you to annotate/mark.
• Red apple with green tick: Work has saved annotations/marks.

To open the assignment in GradeMark, click on the apple icon.

Annotating the Work

To add a comment, click on the page.  The comments box will open, allowing you to type your comment.  By default, the comment bubble icon is used to show a comment, as shown below.

	You can also choose alternative icons by clicking on the bubble next to the comment box.
	You can use the highlighter and text tools to highlight or strike-through sections of the paper, or to write directly onto the page.  There are different colour options available by clicking on the box next to the text tool.  The arrows allow you to jump from comment to comment to review them.
	Hovering over a comment bubble allows you to edit or delete the comment.

Experiment by adding comments and using the different commenting tools.

Grading the Work

On the right hand side of the tool bar you will see the area where the grade is displayed and a link labeled edit. Click on the link to change the student's grade.

Use the Save command on gradebook's File menu to save your annotations and grade.

Working Off-Line

If the student's work is very long you may prefer to study hard copy away from your computer and then come back to annotate and grade. This is possible in two ways.

1. From the In Box click on the page icon in the column labeled file. This will allow you to download the student's file to your computer from where you can print it.
2. From inside the Grademark grading tool choose the print command from the file menu. This will allow you to print a version that includes all your annotations. (The student can also print this view of their work.)

Caveats

Each assignment in box has three dates set: the start, due and post dates. The start date refers to when students are permitted to hand in work. The due date is when students will no longer be allowed to upload revised versions of their work. The post date is when the students will be given access to annotated versions of their work and their grade.

• The post date can be set either before or after the due date.
• Warning: if you annotate/grade work after the post date it will become visible to the student immediately.
• If you save annotations, then the student views those and after that you make more annotations then the student will not be alerted. You will have to use another communication channel to get them to look at the revised annotations.
• If you save annotations after the post date and the student uploads a new draft then the annotations will be lost.
• If the student's work is long or has complex layout and graphics then there could be a long delay between them submitting it and the gradebook functionality becoming available. This is because the turn-it-in system must process the file to make it readable in your web browser.