Speaker 1: Having an empty pile of papers to grade is kind of like a billion dollars. You've heard of it, you know it has to exist, but you've never actually seen it in real life. Grading is something a lot of teachers struggle with because it's time consuming, and it's something you can't avoid. But in today's video, I'm going to share with you all 13 hacks that will make your grading experience that much better. It is nearing the end of a marking period, and for me, that tends to be the time, you know, papers just start piling on up. I looked ahead at my week, and if I'm not teaching this week, I'm going to be grading. But instead of just filming myself grading and then, you know, speeding it up, adding some music, I wanted to make sure I was giving you all actual content that you could take back to your own classroom and use. So I'm going to share with you some of my best grading tips that I have learned over my years as a teacher. Now, some of you new teachers or soon-to-be teachers, you're probably still in that phase where you really, really enjoy grading. You're like, hey, I've got colorful pens. I've got scented stickers. This is really fun. Listen, there will come a day when you have 200 papers that you have to get graded because grades are due the next morning. There is not a pen colorful enough or a sticker scented enough to make that experience enjoyable. Trust me, I've been there. Hopefully after watching today's video, that will never happen to you because trust me, it's not fun. Grading hack number one is to stop grading everything. If you have been told that you have to grade every assignment you give your students, sorry, but I'm here to tell you, you've been lied to. Districts do tend to have a certain number of requirements for grades. Personally, by the end of the marking period, I have to have six to eight grades in each subject area. For me, math, computational skills, math problem solving, and then science. Each one of those, I have to have six to eight grades. Obviously, I am giving more than six to eight assignments throughout the marking period. One trick I like to use when I'm not going to actually grade an assignment, but I still want to get data from it, is I will sort the assignment into piles. This is perfect for exit tickets, check for understandings, and even classwork assignments. I will sort them into three piles. One pile is my students who definitely got it, they're ready to move on. One pile is for students who have got it, but they're still making small mistakes and maybe need a little bit more support. And then one pile for my students who need to be re-taught and need a lot of additional support. Once I sort it into those three piles, I usually write down the names, I kind of transfer that into my data binder, and then I can either just star the paper and send it home with my students, or sometimes I love to put it in my special little filing bin called, you know, the recycling bin. That's another note, recycling papers does not mean you are a bad teacher. Sometimes it just, it happens and it's okay. One last little point on this. I do recommend re-evaluating the work you are giving to your students. It should always have a purpose. Really try to stay away from busy work because it's not enjoyable for your students and it's not giving any kind of actual data to help further your instruction. So just, you know, get rid of it. Grading hack number two is to use technology. Technology is your friend. Now I understand not all teachers have access to as much technology as others. Totally gotcha. But if you do have access to technology, you should be using it. There are infinite numbers. Okay, maybe not infinite. That's an exaggeration. But there are a lot of websites and programs that are all free, okay? Perfect for teachers and are self-grading. Self-grading. I don't know about you, but that's literally music to my ears. My personal favorite is Google Forms because we use Google Classroom a lot. So I'm going to walk you through how to use a Google Form and make it into a self-grading quiz. Think of me later. This is my Google Drive on my iPad, but it will look essentially the same if you're on a desktop computer or a laptop computer. In order to create a Google Form, you go over here to New. Then you select More. And then Google Form should be the first option. Once you click it, it will open up a new tab. And this is your form that you are able to fully customize it. If you really want to, you can change the background. You can change the colors, images, all that. I typically don't make mine that fancy because it's just not necessary. But you can add your title right here. So let's say this was Multiplication Quiz. I can just type that in. Then you can add a description if you want. And you're able to start editing your questions. Now I am going to recommend that your first question be, What is your name? Where is my question mark? Okay, there we go. You're going to want to make this short answer so that way they can type in their text. Then I recommend starting to add in your multiple choice questions. So we could do, What is 2 times 5? And then you can add in your answer choices. So maybe I have 12. And then I could have 10. And so on. So I'm going to add all my answer choices. And I can repeat this for every new question. Right over here with the plus sign will create a new question. So once I have all of the questions that I want for my quiz, in order to make it self-grading, you have to come up here to the little gear symbol. That is your settings. And you want to come over to the quizzes tab. You're going to want to make sure this is marked so it turns purple. Make this a quiz. Now the rest of this is just really personal preference. So if you want students to immediately see their grade, you can leave this one selected. But if you have short answers or like essays that your students are writing, I wouldn't recommend keeping that one. I would pick this later one so you can manually grade those. But if it's all multiple choice, true, false, you can go ahead and leave the first one. And then this is personal preference as well. So go ahead and save that. Now obviously for this first question I don't need to have it actually graded because it's just them putting in their name. Down here you are going to want to select your answers key. So let's go back to this question. What is 2 times 5? I'm going to come down to the answer key and select it. This is where I'm going to mark which answer is correct. So here 10 is the correct answer. And then if you want to you can add answer feedback. I typically don't. But you do want to assign a point value. So I'm going to make this one just worth 1 point, but not 11. Let's not do that. And that is, again, totally personal preference how many points each one is. So you want to repeat that process of adding the answer key for each of your questions. And then once you have done that, you are all ready to send out your quiz to your students. And in order to send it out you go up here to the send button. And you want to come over to this little link icon. And I typically do like the shorter URL just because it looks less intimidating. But you could also make this into a bit.ly link. And I will copy this and I will post this onto Google Classroom so my students can go on and access it. As they start submitting their responses over here on the responses tab, I will be able to see their responses, but they will not be able to see each other. So hopefully this was helpful. People do create more in-depth tutorials on this on YouTube. So you can go on and search if this wasn't good enough for you. But I just wanted to keep it nice, short, simple, and to the point. Hack number three is to grade papers as a class. Now before you come shooting the messenger, I'm going to throw this out there. Do check your district's grading policy first to make sure that this is okay. There's a few different ways you can do it. You can have students swap papers and grade each other's. Or my personal preference is to actually have students grade their own paper. It's really powerful for them to see where they made mistakes and already start to figure out what they did wrong and how they can improve it the next time. If you are going to do this, I highly suggest emphasizing honesty and emphasizing trust within your students. And a lot of that just comes from building a great relationship, which if you're a great teacher, you're already doing that. I also recommend having students use a different colored pen or marker or colored pencil so that they can differentiate between what they did the first time and when they graded it. Hack number four is kind of an alternative to hack number three, but it's a little bit different. Set up a grading station. Unlike grading as a class, which does tend to take up, you know, a fair amount of class time, a grading station makes it so that students can check their work as they finish. For this one, I just suggest putting a couple copies of the answer key into page protectors and laying them out in an area that is away from where students are working. Now, if you're going to do this, you're going to want to make sure that you have a really good grade system. Lay them out in an area that is away from where students are working. Again, I do recommend having different colored pens or markers available for students to use as they check their work. And I also suggest having a grading station set up somewhere, maybe by where you were working as the teacher, just to help reinforce that, you know, trust and responsibility and honesty with your students. So one example would be my students are at their seats working on an independent assignment. I may be at my back table helping some students in reteaching and I could have the grading station set up next to me. So as students finish at their seat, they can come up to the grading station, use the answer key, check over their work. I'm right there to, you know, just check in on their little honesty and then they can turn it into the turn in bin. Tip number five, I'm going to call check in and grade. There are a lot of times when my students are working on an independent assignment. I may just be circulating around the room, kind of checking in with them. And as I check in with them, if I notice certain questions correct, I will just go ahead and mark it on their paper. That way, when they turn it in, half of their questions may already be graded. Another great thing about this, and it works really well for classwork assignments, if a student notices, oh, hey, Ms. Ferre has marked numbers one and two correct, but she didn't mark number three correct, it kind of gives them a chance to go back and fix their work, which again, I think is really powerful when students are able to identify their mistakes. Again, probably wouldn't want to use this one for tests or for quizzes, but for those classwork assignments, it works great. Hack number six is to organize your paper flow. And you all know, no rhyme intended, that because it has the word organize in it, this is one of my favorite tips. It is really difficult to stay on top of your grading if you do not have a system for students to turn papers in and then a place to put those papers until they are graded. So I'm going to walk you through, show you my exact system, and give you some little tips, some little tricks to help make it that much easier for you. This is my turn-in station for my papers. I have two different groups of students, a block one and a block two, so I have two different turn-in bins to help keep those papers separate. You will notice in the middle, I also have a stapler in case my students have to staple their paper. And then I also have these highlighters. We have our students highlight their names on their papers based on their homeroom class so that it is that much easier to pass papers back. Now these turn-in bins came from Big Lots, but you can get them a lot of different places. I like them because they hold a lot of papers. I labeled them in the front with these labels. These are in my TPT store. I will link them for you down in the description box. My teacher's assistant then gathers all of the papers from the turn-in bin and they will binder clip them. Now I use color-coded binder clips. They are from Amazon. I will link them for you. My block one uses pink and then my block two uses blue. You also will notice I have larger binder clips and I have smaller binder clips depending on how many papers they actually turned in. And those are labeled the same as the turn-in bin in case my teacher's assistant forgets. Also, side note, these labels for the mini Sterlite drawers are in my TPT store. They are editable. And they will be linked for you in the description box. Once the papers have been binder clipped, my teacher's assistant will plop them right into my grade drawer. This is kind of my storing place for papers until I have time to grade them. Anyway, they are out of the way. These are the Sterlite 8.5x11 drawers. I will link these for you in the description box. These labels are in my TPT store as well. They are editable and they match the mini Sterlite drawer labels. So I will link those for you in the description box as well. I love these because they fit papers perfectly and they're just great for getting maybe your copies for the week or papers to grade or copy your file out of the way and it keeps things nice and organized. Hack number seven is to sort your papers alphabetically. I know what you're thinking. You're already like, Michelle, that's hilarious, but I don't have time to do that. I know you don't have time to do it. That's why I said sort the papers alphabetically, not you sort the papers alphabetically, which is really code for have a student do it. Personally, I have a teacher's assistant who helps me with everything. My life would fall apart without this student. I train this student to do all kinds of little tasks for me. I train this student to do all kinds of little tasks for me, including moving my papers from the turning bin to the grade drawer and they also sort them alphabetically. Now to make this easier, I do print out an alphabetical roster for both of my blocks and I just magnet it. I don't know if that's a verb, but it is now. I magnet it to my whiteboard right above the turning bins. That way the students can reference it and it's super easy for them to put it in order and then move it on over to my grade drawer. Another easy way to do this is to assign your students a number and that number would correspond to where they are alphabetically within the roster. That makes it really easy because you start to know students by their number and then you're able to quickly see their name and go, ooh, that's number eight or that's number 15 and it just makes it that much easier to sort them alphabetically. And I know you're wondering, why do I need to put them in alphabetically? Here's the thing. Once you grade the papers, you then have to put them in your grade book. I don't know about you. My grade book is alphabetical. So once I have graded the papers, they're already in alphabetical order. All I have to do is just flip through them, enter them in the grade book, and then I'm done. Side note, I'm done using this little hand signal. So from this point forward, we're going to use good to go, you know, from the Taco Bell commercials like 2005, 2006. What's that?

Speaker 2: It's a Crunchwrap Supreme. All the classic Taco Bell tastes grilled up, so it's good to go.

Speaker 1: Hack number eight is to use consistent grading marks. Every teacher grades a different way and that's okay. You know, we're all individuals. You have to do you. Some of us like to check correct answers. Some of us like to circle incorrect ones or put a slash through incorrect ones. Whatever works for you. I just suggest finding consistent marks that you stick with because the more you do those marks, the easier it gets and the more time consuming it is. I do recommend taking a look at how you are grading the papers and figuring out if there's anything you can do to save yourself time. For example, you may not want to write the correct answer next to every single incorrect answer. Personally, our students are able to complete redo, so I do not write the correct answer on there. That way, if my students do complete a redo, they have to figure it out for themselves. But find little ways that you could actually save yourself time with the way you are actually marking papers. My personal favorite, I love to just put a slash through one that's incorrect and move right along. Good to go. Hack number nine is to grade in small chunks. Side note, does anyone else hate the word chunks or is it just me? One of the main reasons teachers get behind on their grading is because they wait to grade all of their papers when they have a big chunk of time. It is more efficient to use those little chunks of time that kind of appear throughout the day to get your grading done. I will say this works better for assignments that have very concrete answers. It doesn't work well for writing assignments where you really have to sit down and read their writing and then make comments back, but it does work really well for things like multiple choice answers, fill in the blank, maybe simple math computation problems, things that you can check over very quickly. I love to actually start grading papers as my students turn them in. Maybe I give them an exit ticket at the end that I'm going to grade. As they start turning them in, I will just start grabbing them out and start checking them. You also can take papers with you to a meeting. I don't know about you, but a lot of our staff meetings do not always start on time. So I will get there a couple minutes early, sit down with my papers to grade and just start checking them and I'm able to get a couple of them checked before the meeting actually starts. It may not seem like much if you're only getting one or two papers graded at a time, but by the end of the day, you may have half that stack of papers graded and it saves you that much more time. Hack number 10 is to create a comment code sheet. This is a tip that works really, really well for writing assignments. I don't know about you, but I feel like I write the same comments on students' papers all the time. And while it's great to give students detailed feedback, it is not very time efficient, especially if you are grading 60, 70, 80, 100 papers. Ain't nobody got time for that. A comment code sheet is essentially a list of those lengthy comments that you would leave on a student's paper along with a matching code for it. So something super easy to write, maybe it's initials, maybe it's some kind of like a picture, but you give students that comment code sheet at the beginning of the year. You have them put it somewhere that they can always reference it. My students have agenda books. It's something very easily that they can glue in their agenda books. That way, when they get a graded assignment back, they find the code on their paper, go to the comment code sheet to see what that comment actually means. Now, I personally do not have any available, but there are comment code sheets on Teachers Pay Teachers, so I will link a few of those for you in the description box and make your lives that much easier. Hack number 11 is to grade one page at a time. This works really well for those lengthier assignments like tests or quizzes, something that is multiple pages. I recommend grading one page at a time for each student. So I'm gonna grade the first page for every student. Then I'm gonna grade the second page for every student. When you look at the same page over and over again, you start to just memorize the answers and you don't even have to look at the answer key, and therefore it saves you time. Another great way to do this is actually lay out five papers all at once, line them up next to each other. You can quickly go across, check them all, and I suggest writing the number incorrect at the bottom of the page. So for example, if a student got three incorrect, I would write minus three at the bottom of the page. That way, when I'm done grading all of the pages for all of the students, all I have to do is look back at the bottom of each page to see how many total points they got marked off and then write their total score at the top. Hack number 12 is to sit somewhere new. When you sit in the same place for a long time, eh, your motivation, it just tends to kind of, you know, float away. If you are getting bored working in the same spot, go find somewhere else to sit and grade. Make sure it is somewhere that you are comfortable and I do recommend being somewhere away from your computer. I don't know about you, but if I'm sitting at my computer and all of a sudden I hear that little ding go off because I got a new email, I stop what I'm doing, I check my email. Before you know it, I'm buying something on Amazon, okay? So find a spot away from your computer, maybe even leave your phone, you know, away so you're not distracted by that either. Sit somewhere new, it could be the back table, maybe a bean bag, maybe your couch, maybe it's the floor. Find what works for you, be away from your distractions, and get your grading done. Hack number 13 is to treat yourself.

Speaker 2: Three words for you. Treat. Yo. Self. Treat yourself 2011. Once a year, Donna and I spend a day treating ourselves. What do we treat ourselves to? Clothes. Treat yourself. Fragrances. Treat yourself. Massages. Treat yourself. Mimosas. Treat yourself. Fine leather goods. Treat yourself. It's the best day of the year.

Speaker 1: The best day of the year. When you finally have finished grading that huge stack of papers, make sure that you take some time to reward yourself. Now for some of us, that may mean eating your favorite treat, you know, get a little snack in there. For some of us, that may mean watching our favorite show on Netflix. Some of us, it may be doing the two at the same time. Figure out what motivates you. Promise yourself that you will do that when you're done grading. Get your grading done and then enjoy yourself. One other quick little tip that kind of goes along with that, a lot of times when you are seated and you are grading, that's a lot of times that you're very stationary and you know, movement is good for your body. So if you are trying to get some, you know, physical activity in your day, you can actually work that into your grading. I love to take short little breaks, maybe I grade five papers and then I will do some kind of an exercise. Don't, just don't judge me for this, you all. But I will just pop down, maybe I do some like dips on my chair, maybe I do some push-ups and sit-ups, not in a skirt. Okay, don't recommend that. But it's a great way to get a little bit of movement, a little bit of exercise, but also get your grading done. All right friends, those are all of my top grading hack. I really hope that this helped to inspire you to get some grading done, motivate you a little bit, give you some new ideas to try out. If it did, go ahead and give the video a thumbs up. Also, share this out with your teacher friends, you know, bring some more friends into the Pocket Full Primary family. I would really appreciate it. Also, go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you do not miss any future videos. As always, thank you for watching. I love you all so much. Don't forget to put your positive pants on and I will catch you all in the next one. Thank you so much for watching all the way to the end of this video and for supporting my YouTube channel. If you want to check out any of my older videos, you can use the two links right down here. If you want to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss any future videos, you can use the link right up here. The links to all of my social media sites, my Teachers Pay Teacher Store, my merchandise store, my Amazon store are in the description box and I'll catch you guys in the next one.