Make your grading more efficient!

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September is a great month for teaching!    The first few weeks of school is a happy time – new year, new students, new goals AND very little grading.  By the end of September those tests are rolling in and piling up on my desk and in my bag.   October is not as kind to teachers as the month of September.

I would prefer never to give a multiple choice test,  but I have to be practical.  Every year, I have over 150 high school students so to survive I make every test a mix of multiple choice and essay questions.   As test day approaches I gather the Scantron bubble sheets (usually in short supply) and plan an early morning assault on the one working grading machine when no other colleague will want to use it.

BUT FORGET IT! Not this year. INSTEAD…

This year… I manage my classroom on my PHONE! (Teaching? I’m on the phone!)

ZipGrade might be my best app find ever!    The basic phone app is a free download.  The free student answer sheets are downloaded from the site  (ZipGrade.com) in 20, 50 or 100 question formats.

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Dreaming of September Bulletin Boards

As back to school session is underway , I love greeting new students with artfully decorated bulletin boards. My favorite way to do so is with Tagxedo’s word cloud maker.    To use the Tagxedo site you must have Silverlight (a free Microsoft plug-in) installed on your computer.  Silverlight does not work with all browsers.  I ended up using Explorer.  Once you have cleared this hurdle making word clouds on Tagxedo is very intuitive.

I had a great time playing around with the different shapes, fonts, colors – it is very entertaining and totally free!  I finally settled on the traditional apple shape and loaded it with the names of fictional students.   Check out tagxedo.com, see my sample below!

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