Make screen-recordings of the gradings you do by hand so your students can see how you break their code and then learn from your experienced analysis.

  • Benefits to this grading technique:
    • Automated testing cannot give you the same type of insights into your students progress and problems that debugging by hand will.
    • Plus, students won’t be able to disagree with you regarding whether or not their code complies, they’ll see exactly what you saw!
    • Creating the screen-capture takes about the same amount of time that traditional grading does, but it allows for a much richer opportunity to connect with your students.
    • Screencasting uses both audio and visual stimulation.
      • The combined mediums are more engaging than static visuals.
    • This gives you the opportunity to model your critical thinking skills for your students.
    • This doesn’t add a lot of work when you were already going to be debugging programs to determine grades.
  • Transferring large video files is the hardest part of this process.
    • Render the videos when you’re in meetings or sleeping, that way you don’t waste your own time waiting for the video files.
    • Don’t try to email the videos to all your students, the files are too big for emailing!
    • Host videos on a website with a secure logon.
      • You can also track data about when your students log on to watch the videos.
  • Keep a grading checklist on hand when creating these videos to ensure you check off all aspects of the program you wanted to test.
    • This can make the process a bit repetitive but this turns into a huge advantage.
    • Often times, there will be a common mistake that students make.
      • When you discover this mistake you and test for it earlier on in the video and cut down on the total amount of time you spent grading.
  • At first this could add a lot of time to your grading process but you’ll get faster with time and your students will learn so much from this process.

More about this tip

External Source

Interview with Walt Schilling