Lessons Learned: Doctopus and Goobric

So, I was SOO very excited after working with @dlcoachbrooke the last few weeks to get Doctopus and Goobric set up and running. We went through the process of kids drafting inside the templates I created, and it went off without a hitch. We had a few kids who didn't get email notifications, but we were able to work around it with a quick search for the term "Doctopus" in their Google drive. Worked like a charm every time. Setup was a little slow, but fairly simple and reliable.

THEN, came the lessons learned. The instructions for kids to provide feedback are MUCH different than the instructions for teachers. It requires the Goobric for Students extension, and it was a bit of a pain in the rear to work out the exact instructions because no one seemed to have them written down with any kind of detail. So, I had to create my own. Here is the gist:

1. On a computer, kids must use Chrome and log into Chrome using the same account as their Google account. This seemed to help prevent some of the glitches.
2. Go to the Chrome store and load the Goobric for Students extension.
3. Theoretically, they should be able to close the Chrome store and navigate to Google Drive. The Goobric "eye" icon should appear on their URL bar.  For anyone that this does not work, they could usually make it appear by closing and quitting Chrome and coming back into the browser. This took some troubleshooting with a few kids, but we got there eventually.
4. Once the "eye" is working, they needed to go to their template and authorize Goobric to work.
5. Once it was all authorized and ready to go, I had to find a way to share links to their peer's work for evaluation purposes. We had 300+ essays for one assignment, so we took the Doctopus spreadsheet and color coded. We created one color chunk of about 6-7 kiddos. We shared this spreadsheet with a tinyurl to expedite the process. Spreadsheet will look something like this:



6. Each learner was responsible for opening the spreadsheet and providing feedback to every kid who was in their color block.
7. They fill out the rubric by clicking in a square and provide feedback in the written comments section. The student view DOES NOT look like the teacher view, but it does almost the same thing. Almost.

Here is the Google Slideshow I used in class to get the kids set up for evaluations:




After a peer review day or two, we spent another day for the kids to see their peer feedback and to self assess. Here is how you go through this process:

1. Using Chrome the learners open up their document. They should see a red dot in the upper right hand corner near the "Comments" and "Share" buttons. They click on the red button to open a pop-up window which shows them ALL of the rubrics sent to them. Below are a few notes:
--Goobric for students does NOT send emails with rubric info like it would if a teacher completed the rubric.
--Each time a student hits submit it is saved as a new rubric. So advise your kids to complete the entire rubric and then hit submit.
--Goobric is apparently pretty finicky about the internet connection. In the morning hours we were experiencing some wireless issues and the red dot would not appear for some or would appear and then disappear or would not load the pop-up window, etc. Bottom line, you need a strong connection to get to your feedback.
2. After reviewing their feedback, learners clicked on their own "Assess this Document" button and completed their own rubric and wrote a reflection in the comments box.

So, the process was not flawless. And I did feel like I was going to pull my hair out more than once. BUT, in the end we made it work. I think it was a valuable activity--the kids got feedback from 5 different people from various classes and ability levels. So, that meant more to think about and reflect on. I am not 100% sold as to whether or not I will use this method again, but in the end, it did what I needed it to do, it was just a lot of work to get it done.