Thing 18: Student Assessment and Feedback Tools

While on a run one day with a friend who is a literacy coach in a neighboring district, she asked me if I had ever used "Orange Slice." I had never heard of it, so instantly looked into it. I quickly began to play with it and liked the potential that it offered, but found that there was a huge a learning curve and since I didn't immediately have a need for it, I gave up on it. So, I thought I would take the opportunity to revisit it during this online class.

What is Orange Slice? 

Orange Slice is a free add-on from Google. It allows for you to create a rubric within an assignment on a GoogleDoc and individually grade and provide feedback to each individual students work. Once the rubric is created it automatically provides the student with a grade. It even pairs with Google Classroom when grading assignments. There is also a feature for student rubrics, where students can peer review each others assignments. This is a feature that I did not look into, although in hindsight that might have been a good option for my students to review their own work.

As mentioned above there is a learning curve when trying to start. So, in this attempt to learn the tool, I went out to find some tutorials and came across an article written by Joyce Valenza in SLJ that featured Orange Slice. She does an excellent job explaining the tool and also provides tutorials within her article. If anyone is interested in learning how to use Orange Slice, I found her article to be the most helpful:  http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2015/12/12/orange-slice-rubrics-for-docs/.

If you would rather not read the article and just watch a tutorial, I felt this one was a great one to start with:

How I used Orange Slice? 

I decided that I wanted to be able to grade our 6th grade students on their book talks that they were required to give weekly in the library. I had given the students a checklist of things that I was looking for in their book talk and then used the Orange Slice add-on to create a rubric to assess those things. 

This process was a little frustrating at first. Getting the add-on is not a problem at all, but once you begin to build your rubric it takes some time to learn what each of the options are asking you. I often times chose an option that wasn't doing what I thought it was supposed to do. I quickly learned though, that you can add and edit anything just like you would in building any table in Docs. Once you start building your table and you get to the option that says: "Categories" you can pick a blank one and it will put one blank row on your table and five columns. You can add rows from there and delete the columns as you wish as well. Once you finish and select "Sore rubric" it will automatically account for the changes that you made to the rubric. 

I know that Joyce Valenza claims this is easy and I do want to stress that once you build it and learn it, it is beyond easy, but it does take time initially. 

Some quick tips for your first use:

• Have your rubric layout sketched out on paper.
• Add your own rows and columns to your table (you don't need to use theirs). 
• Everything is editable and changeable.
• Be patient it is worth it!!! 

Once your rubric is made you can copy and paste it into any Google Doc.

The tricky part for me was that I wanted to have students view their book talk first, grade themselves and then I wanted to be able to give them their final grade using the rubric that I pasted into their assignment. I was having trouble doing this at first because I couldn't submit the entire assignment within a Google Doc and share their individual links. Even if I indicated that I wanted a "copy" for each student they wouldn't have their specific link to their video. Lucky for me a few days ago Google came out with the new feature that we could create individual assignments. Now, I can use my template, insert the individual link and create an individual assignment for each student in Google Classroom. This worked perfectly!! 

The students were able to view their assignment, watch their video, use the attached rubric to grade

themselves and then return it to me for a final grade. It was so simple to be able to grade inside the assignment with the rubric embedded. All I needed to do was click on the box, it highlighted it and then gave them a grade. It was also nice for the students to be able see the criteria attached within the assignment to clearly let them know the expectations. The best part is, now I can embed this rubric into any assignment on a Google Doc.

Overall, I would say, give it a try or at least suggest it to your teachers. There is a learning curve, but once you become familiar with it, it will save you tons of time on the back end.

Thing 9: Database and Search Tools

I chose this "thing" because I am always looking for new search tools that are applicable for elementary students. As much as we have a strong list of databases that we offer our students, both the students and the teachers want to search the Internet. Therefore, I decided to venture into the resources and articles listed under this assignment. I first started off with the idea that I was going to find new search tools or ideas for helping students to search and ended up in a completely different direction. I began by reading, "6 Steps to Teaching Students to Search" to see if there was any new tips/ strategies that I could pick up that would helper younger students search on the Internet. Unfortunately, this article didn't provide any new information for me. Next, I read an article in the School Library Journal, that caught my attention, " Goodbye, Boring Database Instruction. Hello, Search App Smackdown." I was instantly engaged in this article from the onset. Brenda Boyner, discusses how database interaction can become "tired-and-boring" and that she developed instruction that became more meaningful to the students. She started off by no longer calling them databases, but "Search Apps." She then took it one step further by creating a "Search App Smackdown."

The "Search App Smackdown" peaked my interest for two reasons. First, it seemed like it could help make databases more appealing to the user. Second, it seemed like it will allow me to actually spend quality time teaching the databases and comparing different databases. Unfortunately, some of the resources & links mentioned in the article, I wasn't able to access, but I was still able to get the main idea. Basically, she takes two of the databases creates a video tutorial of each of the databases and assigns them to watch them for homework (flipped classroom approach).While watching the videos student fill out notes on an organizer (I couldn't find this resource at first, but was able to find it in the "comments" section at the end of the article). The next day they come to class, hand in their organizers (which get graded) and form teams. Each team uses the databases to answer a series of question cards. Once the team answers the questions they have a "runner" deliver the answer to the librarian. The librarian indicates whether they have the right answer and awards points.  This game allows students to quickly navigate the databases and their featured tools/ resources, while also making learning fun and meaningful.

Although, I love the concept of the Smackdown and how it gets the students to use the databases, I don't have the same type of class structure/ opportunity as this High School librarian has. I don't have the ability to assign homework to the students and I don't offer them grades. However, I can certainly use the concept. First off, all our students have iPads K-4 and we have already turned most of the databases into apps, so the idea of calling the databases, "Search Apps" will be easy enough. However, what I decided to do was take an idea from what I saw at a NYSCATE conference and blend it with this "Smackdown" concept.  They had a variety of presenters get up and present a new App and they had 3 minutes to give a quick tutorial on it. Once their time was up they said, "Slam" and the audience repeated. The next person had 3 minutes to showcase the next tool. In the end the audience voted on who presented the best tools. Surprisingly they called this "App Smackdown" as well.

Evaluation Sheet
(Please let me know if you would
like access to this document)

Here is my idea for a hybrid of the activities that I think will be both engaging and meaningful. We are starting an inquiry on the American Revolution in 4th grade. This is a 2-3 week unit that I usually introduce various databases along the way. I would love to be able to spend a little more time having both the teachers and the students look more closely at the databases. So, I am going to ask the teachers if they would be open to competing in an "App Smackdown" with me. At the beginning of a lesson, both the teacher and I will have 3 minutes to share a database with the class. We will then have the students use the "Search Apps (databases)" during their research that day. At the end of the lesson students will need to fill out an evaluation sheet that I created indicating which "Search App (database)" won. We will continue to do this throughout the unit, allowing for the students and teachers to learn several new databases and new content as well. Of course, there should probably be a prize for the winning resource! Any ideas???