“Back in the day” it was a stack of essays which went into the famous teacher tote bag. Now it’s an inbox full of submissions of digital docs. While the handwriting may be better, the attention-to-detail isn’t automatically improved, even with in-app spelling and grammar checkers. An ever-present task with writing assignments is scoring the details and the content. A full inbox can be as daunting as a pile of papers, but CheckMark provides some options for streamlining the process.
In short, CheckMark is a Chrome extension for creating basic or customized feedback comments in Google Docs to facilitate and enhance the grading process. The process is actually very simple, but demonstrates profound value in the savings of time and effort, which allows teachers to do much more than was previously achievable. Standard practice when providing feedback comments in Google Docs would be to select a particular word or phrase, click the + icon on the right margin, type the words for the comment, and then save. However, with CheckMark enabled, as soon as a word or phrase is highlighted, a translucent keyboard appears over the text. By clicking the RO button, for example, all the steps are completed for posting a comment which says “Check for run-on sentence” with just one click. The tool comes with 17 basic comments pre-loaded, but adding new ones is simple. It is even possible to have multiple keyboards for application to different classes.
While the value of this tool for the teacher is clear, it creates several valuable outcomes for the student. First, when comments are easier to do (just one touch), a teacher is able to be more thorough in the application of them without becoming exhausted in the process. More thorough feedback provides more coaching to help the student recognize, and thus minimize, errors. Second, a feature of CheckMarks includes a red circle in the lower right corner of each comment which bears a number that corresponds to the number of times that comment has been made in the document. Therefore, if a student perpetually makes the same mistake, it becomes clearer to the teacher for appropriate scoring, as opposed to a casual error which is overlooked, but generally under control. The ability differentiate quickly and easily between patterns of mistakes on mere oversights offers clear value in the grading process. Finally, the customization of the tool is the beauty of it. With a limited set of responses, it would quickly become a handicap in having to make some comments easily and others with far more effort.
Given that these are a few of the “pros” of CheckMark, let’s go one step further into the realm of super-pro. Because CheckMark can post comments of any length, the tool could also be utilized for loading rubric-based comments so that students were better able to identify the specific place in the document where they are assessed as demonstrating a particular rubric quality. While teachers would like to believe that students read rubrics comments and internalize their value, students do not always have the sophisticated level of flexibility and comprehension to apply rubrics to their own work (Andrade, Du, and Wang, 2008). However, greater exposure, specificity, and consistency are likely to have a positive impact on that strategy. It has also been demonstrated by Fraile, Panadero, and Pardo (2017), that co-creating rubrics with students can improve and empower their own assessment skills for self-regulated learning. If we jump all the way into the ‘rabbit-hole’, Alice, imagine the wonderland of students empowered with CheckMark on their own computers so that they can provide targeted peer feedback which does not rely on the “nice job” rhetoric among students. Rubric-based feedback, made possible by the efficient application of CheckMark, could provide an opportunity for peers to dialogue the merits of text to challenge peer feedback to provide a level of rigor seldom believed possible with collaborative assessment.
CheckMark, however, is not without its challenges. A simple, but frustrating aspect is that it functions as a Chrome extension instead of as a Google add-on. As an extension, it becomes and always-on prospect and the hovering keyboard can become an annoyance. As an add-on, it could be triggered any time a teacher goes into feedback mode in Google Docs. Next, on multiple occasions, some customizations have not saved appropriately. If juggling multiple Google accounts, such as work, personal, and educational, what has been downloaded for one account does not carry through to the other accounts, making it perplexing when they option isn’t available to the customized keyboard is different from account to account.
In applying the Triple E Evaluation Rubric (Kolb), CheckMark scores well as a way to “cause a shift in the behavior of the student, where they move from passive to active learners” and also “create supports … to make it easier to understand concepts or ideas”. While other criteria are less applicable with the intended purpose of CheckMark as a facilitator for scoring by teachers, the advanced uses of the tool could easily demonstrate far more active learning, authentic experiences, skill acquisitions, and empowerments for learners on their own or collaboratively.
This tool empowers teachers, as well, to fulfill the sixth criteria of the ISTE Standards for Educators to act as a facilitator including 6a (fostering a culture where students take ownership of their learning goals and outcomes), 6b (managing the use of technology), and 6d (nurturing creative expression to communicate ideas, knowledge, and connections). Teachers are certainly able to demonstrate the 7b criteria of using technology to implement a variety of formative and summative assessments that provide timely feedback.
Perhaps the bottom line with CheckMark is that the goal was to simplify an arduous task, in order to facilitate the process of providing student feedback. Anything that can really make life simpler for teachers, who have so many tasks to manage, is a bonus.
References
Andrade, H., Du, Y., & Wang, X. (2008). Putting Rubrics to the Test: The Effect of a Model, Criteria Generation, and Rubric-Referenced Self-Assessment on Elementary School Students’ Writing. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 27(2), 3-13.
Fraile, J., Panadero, E., & Pardo, R. (2017). Co-creating rubrics: The effects on self-regulated learning, self-efficacy and performance of establishing assessment criteria with students. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 53, 69-76.
International Society for Technology in Education. (2019). ISTE Standards for Educators. Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-educators .
Kolb, L. (2019). Triple E Rubric for Evaluating Apps and Websites. http://www.TripleEFramework.com . Retrieved from https://www.tripleeframework.com/triple-e-printable-rubric-for-app-evaluation.html .
Teacher Takeaways
CheckMark empowers teachers with simple, time-saving methods for the tremendous task for providing effective and timely feedback to students.
EmpowerED 