Peer Evaluation Using Google Add-ons: Doctopus and Goobric

Last year I posted all of my excitement about the Blackboard peer and self evaluation features. It wasn't perfect, but it allowed me to run a peer and self evaluation feature across 300+ learners with a simple click of some buttons rather than shuffling and sorting papers for two or three days. Unfortunately, my district moved away from Blackboard as our LMS and moved to Schoology. While I don't have major complaints about Schoology, my biggest complaint is that there is NO options for peer or self evaluation. So, I recently sought out the help of our campus DLCs, Brooke and Kelly, to try and come up with some way to recreate what Blackboard was doing for us.

After meeting and going over a few options, we are going to give Doctopus and Goobric a whirl. Theoretically, the kids would type their essays onto templates which I create and use Doctopus to share with all of the kids. By creating a roster and running this roster and template through Doctopus, every kid will automatically have a document with the correct shared settings and their links will be populated in a Google spreadsheet as well as copied into my Drive if I choose. This means no turn in or ownership issues, etc.

As a part of this process, I want my kids to be able to self and peer assess. The Goobric extension allows us to attach a rubric to the template I am sharing with the kiddos. When the document is viewed with the Goobric for Students extension loaded, we see a nifty little button that says "Assess this Doc." When we use this button, we have the option of filling in the rubric and providing written feedback.  Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom, we have peer and self assessment!

For the instructions for loading Doctopus, creating rosters, sharing documents, and attaching rubrics, please click here.

I feel like I should warn you that as far as I have gotten in this process is the set up. I have not tested beyond these instructions. I ran the documents with this setup, and it worked just fine. HOWEVER, we created 1 roster with over 300 kiddos on it, and it was VERY slow. In the future, I will probably break them into smaller groups OR I will start earlier. Look for a future blog post on my progress later!