Grading is time consuming. That’s nothing new. You could spend so much more time differentiating instruction and remediating if you had a little more time on your hands. Technology is here to help. Let’s talk about some of the self-grading tech resources that are available (for free!) to help you out.
We did a post a while back about formative assessment, and a lot of that information applies here too. Services like Socrative, Kahoot, and bubble sheets from MasteryConnect offer self-grading assessment that can be uploaded directly to your gradebook.
If your class is 1:1 with devices, I recommend using BlendSpace. It’s free, and it not only allows you to create your entire lesson in one place that is connected to your Google Drive, Flickr, YouTube, Dropbox, and all of the files that are saved on your computer, but it also allows you to create self-grading assessments. You enter the questions and answers, your students sign in to your “class” from their own BlendSpace accounts linked with your teacher account, they take the quiz and click “submit.”
Google Forms is another nice way of creating self-grading assessments. This requires a little bit of spreadsheet work on your part, but after you do it once, it’s easy to repeat over and over again. Basically, you create your quiz in Google Forms, and answer the questions (correctly) yourself. In your Drive, you’ll see the response spreadsheet, and you can then insert a Chrome add-on script (called Flubaroo) that will then allow you to grade the assignment for each student and email them the results. There are other, slightly more complicated methods for doing this but Flubaroo is the most effective.
Hope that’s helpful! Already have a favorite auto-grading system? Tell us about it in the comments.