billso.com

I’ve graded Paper 1 for the IS-6100 E Thursday evening course, and I’ve started grading the papers for my online IS 6100 and IS 7010 students. I plan on finishing these by Wednesday night. I don’t have everyone’s grades posted yet, but I will be working hard over the next 60 hours to get them done.

I’m using TurnItIn.com’s GradeMark feature. This allows me to mark and comment student papers in my web browser without downloading the papers. This means that I don’t have to upload or download papers to WebCT or e-mail. WebCT has some usability and reliability issues of its own.

There’s no guarantee that students might receive my e-mails, and vice versa. I’ll discuss this point in a future blog post.
So I use TurnItIn.com to handle assignments. I like this system a lot.

TurnItIn.com displays a tiny red-and-black icon when my GradeMark comments are available to each student. As students in last Thursday night’s class discovered, this icon can be very hard to find in your class portfolio page.
Here’s the icon at actual size:

Yes, that was actual size!

Here’s an enlarged version of the icon.

Here’s how the icon might appear in your portfolio page in TurnItIn.com. The icon is underneath a cursor or pointer in this example. That’s the page in our class where you can see your assignment grades.

To view my comments, click on the GradeMark icon once and be patient. It may take up to one minute for the paper to load in your browser. Clicking multiple times on the icon will only restart the downloading process and increase your wait.

Also, it’s a good idea to allow your browser to open pop-up windows from TurnItIn.com. Check your browser’s menu and options.
If you look at the menu in the GradeMark view, you can find options to print all of my comments to a DOC or PDF file. That might be the most convenient way to view and save my comments.

For more information, see the student TurnItIn.com guide, starting at page 15 of http://www.turnitin.com/static/pdf/tii_student_guide.pdf

Students who need help finding their comments should let me know via e-mail. Again, I won’t have all of the comments posted for another couple of days.