Speaker 1: Teachers have more to do than there is time to do, let alone do well. Right just off the top of my head, lesson planning, PLC meetings, grade level meetings, department meetings, classroom setup, classroom cleanup, parent emails, staff emails, making copies, not to mention creating assignments, grading those assignments, posting those assignments, then organizing and handing work back to students. Oh yeah, and teaching. Today I have something exciting to share with you that will give you back both your time and your energy. But first, I'd like to thank Gravik for sponsoring this video. Let's go. We all know that time is our most important asset. It is finite and we can never get it back. So the question is, how do we as teachers come up with ways to take some of our time back so we can spend more time doing what we love? When I started teaching, I would literally fill this milk crate up that I got from the parking lot of my school with papers and then it would take me an entire weekend of just grading those papers. I recently partnered with a company called Gravik that makes a product called Remark Test Grading. And what they do is they create software that both allows you to create assessments that are diverse to the specific needs that your students may need them, and then not only create them, but grade them. And it works with copiers and equipment that your school already owns. One of the issues that I see teachers make often is that they're constantly trying to recreate the wheel. When, you know, you are creating an assessment and every single time you have to put together your format, you have to put together where you want close reading, where you want multiple choice, where you want the essay section, or whatever your class is working on. It's creating this system that takes so much time and energy, where if you knew the questions that you wanted to input and just had a format to be able to put those in, to move them around, to make different versions of the same test, these are just some of the things that Remark allows you to do in their grading system. And so why is this beneficial besides just saving you energy? I am such a true believer, and one of the reasons I would fill this whole crate with work is because I wanted to get students work back to them in real time. I didn't want to grade something that students were going to get a month later or two months later, or I know some of you out there, they did that assignment at the beginning of the quarter, and now it's the end of the quarter, and they're just getting it back. The problem with that is it doesn't allow students to know what their grade is, how they are finding success in your class in real time. It also doesn't allow parents to know what students grades are in a class at any particular time. So through this creation method, and then this grading method, you are allowing yourself to not only create faster, but to get papers and assignments back to students quicker, so that parents and students have a real idea of where their grade is, and their grade doesn't go instead from an 88, and then you graded all this stuff over the series of weeks, and then all of a sudden it's like, Reynolds, I thought I had an 80. Why do I have a 53 right now? This doesn't even make sense. It's also important to mention that by using this system, what you're allowing yourself to do is essentially help students with learning loss in a very real way, because time taken back from assignment and assessment creation, from assignment and assessment grading, allows you to do the thing that you signed up for, and that you love the most, which is actual teaching. One of the things I love is that not only does Remark Test Grading grade your assessments, it also provides detailed reports that show your students' performance, and points out specific areas of strength and weakness that students might have in your class. This data then allows you to help your students with their specific learning loss more directly. So I often think of my day in chunks of time, and so whenever I can sort of come up with systems that I can optimize over time, and then essentially whittle down, like, how can I get better at answering emails? How can I get better at other administrative duties? How can I get faster and more efficient at my grading? What it's doing is allowing me to take that time that I was using somewhere else inefficiently, and put it more into my planning, my lesson creation, and creating ways that are actually fun and magical in the classroom, that in essence, create moments where students are really learning and growing into who they are meant to be. So using the Remark grading system allows you to create online assessments or paper assessments. The grading can also be uploaded to a number of online grade books, which again, saves you time because you're not sitting there inputting numbers onto a keyboard that are going into the cloud somewhere, it's doing it for you. There are a metric ton of training videos for free that come with the software. Not an actual metric ton, I don't even know, I don't even know what a metric ton is, I'll be honest with you, I teach English for a reason. But it comes with a lot of training videos. And one of my favorite things is that assessments can be easily adapted to meet the unique needs of individual students. And this system can be purchased for just a few teachers, or for an entire district. And I know in school sometimes, sometimes, you know, the English department really rallies around something, and they just want to get something for themselves. And then other times, this is so good that your whole school, your whole district wants to jump on board to find ways and systems to optimize their own output. Look, in all facets of my life, one of the things I'm constantly trying to do is create systems that work for me, and then ways to optimize those systems going forward. It is literally how I get so much done in a day. So when I think about how migrating used to take over my whole life, let alone my entire weekend. In the last several years, I've gotten my grading done between 2pm and 2.50pm every single day. That's it. But even if you've optimized to there, I still think there are ways to get even more efficient going forward. And Remark test grading is a perfect way to do that. Find more out about Remark test grading so that your teachers can get more time back, so they can pour their time into what's most important, the kids. You can click the link in the description box below, or go right to RemarkSoftware.com. Don't forget to click the like button, the subscription button, and that little bell so you get a notification every time a video comes up. And look, if you know a teacher that's struggling with their grading, please send this video along to them as well. That's it for now, gang. Peace.