Grading with Jing: Part of My Flipped Classroom Experience

From Evernote:

Back in January, I wrote a post on the Flipped Classroom method and how I planned to incorporate that type of instruction with the Information Literacy course that I teach. I haven't updated on that in quite some time (saving that for another blog post), but it's going extremely well! My post for today touches on how I'm grading some of my research assignments using a combination of Diigo and Jing. Keep reading for more info:

My students have an annotated bibliography due as their final project; but there's one issue that I continue to run into time and time again - students search for their information (websites, journal articles, and books), but they have trouble saving their sources to retrieve later. I toyed with the idea of going paperless and trying to find a way that students could save their work as they search but still be able to add notes and comments. The natural vote would be to use something like Zotero. And I tried that one quarter and ran into quite a few problems... 1) At the time, I had administrative rights and tried downloading Firefox myself to each computer lab desktop. That's fine well and good if I'm logged in...but students couldn't see it under their own log ins. 2) I then turned to the portable firefox option. The only problem was... I only tested it under my account. It worked like a charm, but immediately when the students tried to access portable firefox from their flash-drive under their student log in, an administrative rights error occurred. 

I then had to think on my feet and decided to log into a select few computers under my own log in. This worked fine, but students had to work in groups and they really couldn't save their own work for later use. It was a disaster to say the least!

So, for this quarter, I decided to go a different route and use a social bookmarking tool (Diigo). Students created individual accounts, installed the Diigolet toolbar (a bookmarklet) and went to town saving their sources as they searched. It has worked PERFECTLY! Below is a screenshot of a website being saved, but it also works with databases (extremely well with EBSCO), and our OPAC. 

You can see in the image to the left that students are required to give an APA citation for the source they find, and then to provide a summary that details what the article entails. All they give me is their Diigo url (the formula is http://www.diigo.com/user/usernamegoeshere) and I can instantly see their work and grade it accordingly.

And speaking of grading, that's really what this post is supposed to focus on. I toyed with how I was going to officially grade from the Diigo url's. 

1) Do I try to comment within Diigo? I never could find a feasible way to do this without opening a diigo group...and I didn't want an extra step for my students (I'm using the K.I.S.S. method!)

2) Do I refer to their Diigo url and then type specific comments into our LMS? This seemed like an ok option, but it also seemed to defeat the purpose of using Diigo...I wanted to find a way to look at their work and grade it on the same page.

Enter Jing! I love love love Jing. I use it every day...multiple times a day. I rarely use Jing as a video screencasting tool - mainly I utilize it as a screencapturing tool that allows me to annotated a screen image. With each Diigo assignment, I'm only grading 3 sources at a time, so generally that fits nicely within one browser window. I can easily capture the whole page and then start marking it up with arrows and text. Here's an example to the left.

It's so so easy! Jing allows you the capability of saving the image to your computer, copying and pasting, or - my favorite - sharing via a screencast link. This is what I send my students (the link that is). They're able to click the link, read my comments, and immediately know what sources I'm referring to because it's visual. 

That's it for now - more tips coming soon from my flipped classroom experience!