Chalkup Is Going To Change Your Life.
Every day of my life, I get paid to talk about books.
(Note to 15-year-old Jay: YOU MADE IT BUDDY! YOU'RE AN ENGLISH TEACHER! ALSO YOUR WIFE IS HOT, YOUR KIDS ARE SMART, YOU LEARNED HOW TO PLAY THE GUITAR, AND YOUR MOM LOVES YOU MORE THAN YOUR BROTHER!)
I love getting paid to talk about books and history and ideas. I liked to assign papers. I liked to talk about papers, and plan papers, and help students write papers. But for years, I would rather pry my eyes out with a grapefruit spoon than grade papers.
I hated grading so much that I would avoid it until it was absolutely necessary; you know, the way we treat major surgery, family reunions, or (shudder!) meeting strangers. True story: one April, I had a stack of ungraded AP English, Logic, and Bible papers that measured (I kid you not) 7.5 inches from the top of my desk.
Enter Chalkup. I've only been tinkering with it for a week or so, but I already love it more than at least six of my blood relatives. For the rest of this post, I'm going to throw some screenshots up and walk you through the basics of getting set up and grading your first assignment. If you're reasonably tech-savvy (read: comfortable working in Google Classroom), you won't need it because Chalkup is so simple you could teach a Home Ec teacher to do it.
(Haha Home Ec teachers! That was a zinger, huh? Please don't burn my house down.)
Set up your account at Chalkup.co.
Once you're there, create your class and invite your students by email, or have them create their own accounts and log in using the unique 6-character code associated with your class.
Here's what my home screen looks like:
You see the class stream in the middle, and my three classes (so far) on the left.
Clicking on a class brings up that class menu:
Right now I have the "Assignments" tab pulled up, but as you can see, the class can discuss things, access all course materials, see their grades, or look up individual classmates.
Click that "Add Assignment" button and make them all do something!
That will bring up this window, where you can create your assignment:
From top to bottom: I name the assignment, select the type of assignment, and explain the assignment. (No, this was not a real assignment.)
Check out those three blue checkmarks. The big A+ means "This is a gradeable assignment," so Chalkup knows to put it in my gradebook. The little paper with an arrow means "Hey students, you have to turn something in for this one!" so they don't forget. The Markup Annotations...that's where the magic happens.
Checking that little blue box means when students turn in their assignment, I will be able to interact with it, comment on it, highlight, doodle, and generally do everything I would do with my pen--but no paper ever changes hands. I'll wait for you to pop some champagne.
Moving on down, you select which classes should do the assignment, and tack a due date on the thing.
BUT WAIT JAY WHAT ABOUT THAT "ATTACH A RUBRIC BUTTON"? DOES IT MATTER?
O SWEET MOSES YES IT DOES MATTER.
Using that button, I can select a rubric I've already created, or create a new one. Let's make a simple one.
Your pretty basic rubric. Rows = what you're measuring, columns = how the student did. (I recommend putting the unicorn part on a rubric just once to watch their faces as they try to decide if you're kidding or not.)
Here's what the student sees on their end:
After they review the assignment and take a look at the rubric, they bounce out to type their essay, either in Google Docs or, like a caveman, on word processing software. Either way, they will upload it using the buttons at the bottom once they're done.
AND GRADING THESE THINGS IS MAGIC.
Here's what I see on my end. Whether they uploaded a .doc, .pdf, or embedded a Gdoc, I can make point comments (that little red dot), area comments, (that big red box), highlighted comments (all those yellow bars), or just doodle on the page. (That one would probably be useful if I were grading from an iPad.) I can drop some feedback over there to the right as well, which goes instantly to the student via email (or however they have their notifications set up.)
Here comes the rubric.
Again, drop-dead simple. I click in the boxes as I assess. I can add comments in the boxes to the right. When all is done, I click "Save Grade," and it goes right back to the student's Chalkup account. When they log in again, they'll have the rubric, the numerical grade, and the feedback, all waiting for them.
What's the last thing you did with Chalkup, Jay?
Glad you asked. Yesterday morning, I had my English classes working on an essay identifying parts of our worldview that have been retained from the medieval era, and parts of the medieval worldview that have been dropped by modern minds. Their assignment was simple: write your introduction, and give me your best shot at a spit-ball sentence outline for the rest of the essay.
I attached a short article discussing what a worldview is, and a PDF from a collegiate writing seminar outlining effective strategies for writing introductions, with 15 sample introductions they could mimic. The students opened their Chalkup page, read the attached materials (hopefully), and wrote their intros.
Today, it took me about two minutes per introduction to open, read, give commentary, assess via attached rubric, provide one or two "big picture" feedback sentences, and shoot them back to each student. Tomorrow morning, they'll come in, review their feedback, talk it over with one or two classmates, flesh out the rest of their essay, and turn in whatever they have before the end of the day. Tomorrow night, I'll do the whole thing over again. Friday morning, we won't work on it in class at all, but their final essay will be due via Chalkup by midnight Sunday night.
This system works well for me. You'll have to find what works well for you. But in seventeen years, I haven't encountered a system better-designed to assign, collect, review, assess, and return student writing.
Enjoy!
(I was not compensated by Chalkup for this review. But I am totally open to the idea if they want to throw stacks of money at me. I've always dreamed of wearing a shirt of Benjamins.)
PSA: No one has ever been murdered by Pennywise the Clown on the same day that they shared a post from this website.