Hey, everybody! We are live. I'm here with Megan Tolan, and we're on our journey of helping people understand how to use Canvas. We've been doing this for a couple of days and have a lot more to go. Megan Tolan is one of our educators that we're so excited to have; she's been with Canvas for a long time, switching from K-12 to higher ed, and she's still here. Megan's going to talk today about SpeedGrader, as one of our experts, so enjoy! Megan, good luck!

Thank you! Hi, everyone! Thanks for joining us. Like Mark said, I now work in higher ed; I work in a School of Education. But prior to this, I taught K-12, so I like to live in both worlds here, and hopefully, I'll be able to shed some light on both sides of the Canvas knowledge when it comes to both spaces.

So, alright, this is my course, and you can kind of see I'm going to go from how I navigate Canvas. If anyone is on and has comments about how they get to SpeedGrader, there are multiple ways to get there, which is awesome but can be a bit complicated at the same time. For me, I usually go to Modules because that's where I live. So then, I go ahead and click on Modules, and what I'm looking for is the assignment I want to grade.

So, I'm going to grade one point for this Learning Theories concept map. I'll be really honest: this is a fake course. It’s real, but there are no real people in it, so you're going to see names and some randomly uploaded assignments, but none of it is real data—I'm just trying to protect students and teachers here.

So, I'm in my assignment that I want to grade, and on the right, I'm going to see this option that says SpeedGrader. So, I'm going to click here, and it's going to open up the SpeedGrader window, right? I'm just going to give you a quick tour. At the top, this little icon up here—if I open it, which I will do—is going to take me to what looks like your typical gradebook. I can see student work. Again, this is a fake course, so all of these assignments were submitted late when I was messing around to pull this together for you, but we're going to see our students' names and all the assignments.

This option is going to be—I'm going to talk about that here in a little bit—and then we have some settings here. If I want to go back to the assignment I'm on, I can click this, and it'll take me back to the assignment, giving me some data over here. I have not graded anything for this assignment yet, and then I can see my students' names over here.

So, to get started, you can see here's this fake assignment. This is actually what it looks like when the student submits a Word doc or a PDF—some type of document that I can write on. I can get these annotation tools, so I could say point something out and make a comment. I can highlight, and I can even change my color. Come on! Then it's going to give me the option to make a comment here too, so I can highlight and comment, or I can just highlight.

One of the districts I work with had, in trying to make their grading a little bit faster, come up with a color code system. Like, every time I highlight in yellow, it’s a grammatical error; every time I highlight in green, it’s content. They used that structure from K-12 for the whole building, and that was helpful in consistency with grading. You don’t have to do that, but you can color-code, or you can just leave comments there. You can type—way back when, when I started, I actually was typing like -1 R, -2 on assignments before I learned that I didn't really need to do this.

But I can type on that; I can say, "No, this really isn’t a great idea." So, you can use the strikethrough again. You get all the color choices up here, and then I can comment and say why I would strike that out. You can draw, which is awesome! I actually don't really use this feature very often, but drawing on a track is a little difficult. I can also grab a shape, so I can grab this whole paragraph if I'm going to grab a chunk. This is usually what I do, and then I can comment on this.

Let's see, Chris, this is a really great question. I don't think so; when I grade via Google Docs via URL, which I'm going to show, I just use the built-in Google tools. But if anyone has a better answer to that, please help me out! So, okay, that’s kind of the basics of the annotation tools. Again, that’s going to be more of a doc or a PDF.

Then, again, if I come in here and I change my mind at any time, I can click on it, click on the trash can, and delete that annotation, right? So, if I change my mind, I can take that off, or if I just don’t like the way it looks—that's usually me.

Okay, so I annotate on the doc, and then I'm going to come over here, and I'm just going to put a number in. So, for this assignment, I could say, “Yep, 20 out of 25,” and then I hit return. That can go over here in the assignment comments box. This is where I leave overarching big comments for the work. So, I use the annotation tools to give specific feedback, but over here, I could say, “Regan, this is awesome! Of course, I'm grading myself. You are a rock star!” Right? Whatever you want to put there in big comments.

Once I hit submit, it's going to send that student a message via the inbox if they have their communication tools set up that way, and it's attached to this assignment. So, anytime as a teacher or as a student that I come back to this assignment, we could have a conversation thread here on the student work, which is really pretty handy.

So, that’s like the need-to-know—Sprite comp, annotation, typing in points, big overall comments. The next student, I'm going to go ahead and click over here, and you can see that this student submitted a picture, which is a little bit different. I still get all of the annotation tools, but some of them don’t work as well, so highlighting on a picture isn’t super easy. So, I usually stick to the points or the typing for my annotation tools on a picture, which is pretty handy.

I also like to use rubrics, and we could do a whole session on rubrics, and we probably will! I'll ask Mark to let us know when that's happening. But I click over here, so if I built the rubric while I’m grading or while I’m building the assignment, I can come over here and say, “Oh, click, click, click!” and I can see, “Oh, if they need more detail.” I can comment on those specific points of the rubric I have, so you can type in correctly.

Once I hit save, if I’ve set that rubric up, it’ll add the points and total it together there for me, which is really, really handy. I am team rubrics and SpeedGrader! I sometimes even do like a five-point rubric or a seven-point rubric, and I’m just doing number one, number two, and so forth. I taught science, so sometimes it wasn’t annotating on docs with more problems, so that was a quick way for me to grade. If I wanted to go on top and annotate, I could, but I found myself being much more speedy when I use the rubric.

I'm going to second what Terry said here: if students use Pages, submitting it as a PDF is so helpful—so amen to that! Another feature in SpeedGrader down here, when we get to comments, is the media recorder, and this is the bee's knees for me. I spend a lot of time doing this. So, if I am grading and I've done this rubric, I can come down here, and instead of typing the comments, I can actually hit this little button—there I am again!—and I can record a message to the students.

So, I could say, “Hey, Meghan, this was awesome work! Whatever, whatever, whatever. Next time, be sure to think about this and this and this,” and then hit finish and save. Hold a lot of Wi-Fi here today, so we’ll see. It’s going to drop that video comment into the SpeedGrader. Now, I talk really fast—and, well, it's just I talk fast—so for me, giving video feedback is super powerful as we go to this distance remote. I know a lot of schools are like, “Hey, we're out until May!” This is a great way to get feedback to your learners in a personal way. I can talk for 10 seconds or I can annotate a doc that’s going to take me 10 minutes for a student, and this is a more personal thing.

I have no actual data on this; I actually considered doing it for my dissertation, but I taught a summer course a couple of years ago, and my goal was to do a ton of video feedback inside of the SpeedGrader. I was having students respond to my feedback. So, for any of you teachers out there, right? It’s like the world opens up and the sky shines down on you—this light! Doing the video feedback has been very beneficial for me.

That’s all anecdotal data, but I really like that. If you don’t want to show your face, you can do this and turn off your webcam, and you can actually still just do that audio recording right there in Canvas. Your other option down here is text-to-speech, so you can also, if you're trying to save time as you're grading a lot of work, you could talk into your microphone, and it does a decent job at turning it into text, and then you can hit submit.

So again, that’s just multiple ways to give comments to students. It makes your life as an educator a little bit better, especially when you're grading 120 of something every day. So, alright, are we doing okay? Any major questions? Please feel free to drop them in!

A couple of things I want to discuss about these options up here is that I can click on this student and see all of my students' names. So again, these are real fake students at this point. I'm showing all of my sections, right? So these would be all my students in my course. You can see the orange dots are the students I have not graded, and the green checks are the students I have graded. If it's gray, that student has not submitted any work, unfortunately.

So, I'm going to go over here and click on Troy's work. This is my professor, Dr. Hicks—he didn't really do this; he’s just been a good sport! So this option, this view, what you're noticing here on the window is when we create a text box assignment. So I know we haven't gone through all of the assignments yet, but there's a session coming up on that.

This is a text box submission, and you can see that it just shows up as text. I don’t get those annotation tools when students do the text box submission, but I can still put in points and/or I can still do my rubric, so I have all those options. You also notice right up here that it's telling me that the assignment was submitted late, which is really nice from the teacher's perspective.

I'm going to go over here and grab this person, and you can see that this student doesn’t have a submission, which could be for a variety of things. I know there’s a lot of information floating around right now, but I think if we’re just giving our students and ourselves a little bit of grace, this is going to go a long way.

But you can actually type "meet X" in this assignment box, and it’ll count that as excused, which is really nice. So, if you know you have it, like you’ve given that student a pass for whatever reason, you can give them an excuse grade here, and again, that’ll show up in the gradebook, but Canvas will accept that.

I'm going to go back up here, so again, these are all my sections. For this demo, I don’t have a ton of students, but when I was teaching both high school and higher ed, you know, sometimes I had 120 students in my biology classes, but they’re split into four sections. So, if I was just really trying to crank through one class period, I can click on this little guy and hover down and just say I only want to see students in first period right now, or however your institution names your courses.

But now, when I do that, I only see the two students in first period, so that’s really handy if you’re trying not to feel overwhelmed or you’re just trying to crank through some grading. Okay, much do one class and take a break, and then I can do another class, as opposed to seeing all 120 assignments that you need to grade in one space.

Now, one of the things that I love over in the settings wheel is that if I go to settings, mail, and options, I can sort my student list by student name alphabetically—that’s the default—and I normally switch that ASAP because what drives me crazy is I will want some—you see if I can do this. I’ll show you what it looks like.

So, I need to grade this person, and then I talk to the next student. That one's graded; that one hasn't submitted; that one hasn't submitted. Oh, here’s one that’s graded! So, as far as like my workflow, it feels a little clicky. So, what I do is I come to the settings wheel and I go to options, and I usually say by submission status. This is, again, personal preference, but when I’m grading, I just want to crank through all the grading, and then I can hit save settings, and now I'm going to see the students that need graded first.

So, then I can go to the next student and think, “Great! Here’s her!” Once I get finished, I’ll just hit all the students that have not submitted yet. So for me, it’s like getting all the work that I need to grade, and once I hit that first student that hasn’t submitted, I’m like, “Oh, deep breath! I’m finished for right now,” right? Until they turn it in late, or until the tournament—I guess it could still just be on time if I’m ahead of my grading game.

Thanks, Chris, for helping out. Let’s see, what are my other things? Oh, I want to come back here, back over here in options: you can also hit hide students' names in the SpeedGrader. So, if you’re worried about equitable grading, you can check this box, and all the student names over here are not showing up anymore. So then, of course, if the student's name is on their paper or whatever they submitted, you would see that, but from this perspective, I might not know who’s doing the work.

Although, you know, we all have our biases, so maybe that'll take that out a little bit. You can always choose to check that box. And I told you I’d come back to this for those of you who were here earlier. This post or hide grades—I have been using Canvas for so long it used to be called mute, so I try to use the right language. But I can actually hide the grades until I’ve graded all of their work.

So I can hit hide, and I can grade, let’s see, Miss Joey—and on zero, she didn’t turn it in—and I can keep going through grading students, and then once I’m ready, I open this up and hit post grades. For those of you, and I can choose now, do I want to show it to everyone or just the students that have been graded? So I’m going to hit everyone and hit post.

This is really handy, and I think back to grading lab reports or big essays. As soon as you grade something in Canvas, the grade goes to the gradebook, and should the student choose to get the notification, they could say, “Boom! You have something that’s graded! Awesome!” But also, like if I’m trying to crank through work and I only get through 15 of the lab reports of the 35 I needed to grade, then you might have students who are like, “Oh, you graded so-and-so's, but you haven’t graded mine!” And that’s kind of a nuisance, but it’s a valid point.

The other thing is, if—I don't know, maybe you are not like this—sometimes I get grading and I’ll be like, “Oh gosh, I was too hard on the students at the beginning!” Or “I wasn’t hard enough! I’ve been getting a little more strict as I’ve been going along.” So if I don’t post grades, they’re not seen, and you have that feedback, and I can kind of make any adjustments. If I’ve already posted the grades and I go, “My adjustments—they’re going to see those changes!” So just kind of a self-saver there, and you can choose when you want to post or not post.

Okay, I think those are all the main things in SpeedGrader that I felt like you would really want to know. You can get there a couple of different ways, so if I’m in my gradebook, I can click on this little arrow, and it’ll get me to my SpeedGrader as well. So again, multiple ways to get to that SpeedGrader. My preference is to go to the assignment itself and hit SpeedGrader, and I know that might not always work for everyone, but it works best for me.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something because it’s such a robust tool, so if you have any questions or want to reach out, I’m happy to help. Mark, do you see any major questions on the thread? The community’s done a really good job at responding to everything. If anybody has any last-minute questions for Meghan, let us know—type them there in the comments section; we’ll see them and throw them up. We’ll give you about 30 seconds, so type quickly!

Okay, oh, you know, while we’re waiting, I actually—Kris asked a question, and I meant to bring that up and I didn’t. So I’m going to go back into SpeedGrader here. I actually have a student’s MIT where we use Google, and so I have students submit in Google. When students submit a website, it gives you a quick screenshot of what it looks like in the moment, but if I click this link, it actually embeds that Google Doc into Canvas.

So, and then this is the question Chris asked: I don’t get that—I lose the annotation tools that Canvas provides, but I do get all the Google features, so I can leave comments right here and I don’t have to open up that Google Doc in a new tab, which is pretty handy. So when my students submit a website URL, that can be any type of website URL specifically, but when my students submit them for Google Docs, they can share with “can comment” access, and I can use the Google features too. So that is another option that I meant to talk about earlier but did not.

Awesome! A really great response from the community. Looks like we have somebody who missed the start. These are all available—we’ll throw the link where people can see them on the website. On structure.com, there’s another one of these coming up at 3 o'clock Eastern today with Tammy talking about setting up assignments. So, special thanks to Megan, and we will talk to everybody soon! Thank you!