Literature Teacher Makes the Abstract Measurable with GradeCam

To say that GradeCam has made my life easier as a teacher is an understatement.

Hey everyone! My name is Randy Norman, and I am a 9th grade literature teacher who has the pleasure of working at Eastside High School in Covington, Georgia. In addition to teaching 9th grade lit, I am also a Microsoft Innovative Educator Trainer who gets to travel the country teaching teachers how Microsoft products can help them in their classrooms.

However, there is one program that I consistently use that is not part of the Microsoft brand: GradeCam.

As an English teacher, I am a big fan of formative assessments. My class hinges on the abstract, and this abstract can be hard to measure in terms of learned knowledge.

Well, I should say it can be hard to measure on large summative tests where the content is smashed together with ten other concepts. Because of this, I heavily rely on formative assessments to guide my lessons.

I try to give 2-3 formative assessments a week. Now, I know what you are thinking. I promise you; I have not lost my mind! I have simply found a way to make formative assessments quick, pain-free, and authentic.

GradeCam, if you are not aware, is a program that allows you to scan answer sheets into your computer using a document camera. Here are some of the highlights:

• You can use pretty much any document camera.
• They have a phone app that uses your camera to scan!! ☺
• You can fix answers if a student marked more than one.
• I can scan 30-50 answer sheets in a minute or two.
• I can automatically send the results to my district’s grading software (Infinite Campus).
• I get automatic results of how my students did.
• I get a breakdown of how each question was answered.
• I can attach numerous standards to numerous questions.

I could go on and on. But, because of GradeCam, I am able to quickly give formative assessments during the opening of a class, and I can scan them at the end of the day to see how well my kids understand what we are covering.

Since I can see all the data in class view or student view, I can quickly make corrections to my lessons. I also make my formative assessments truly formative by not grading them, but they know if they slack off, I will count theirs as a grade ☺

I’ve tried ZipGrade, and I have even tried the good ol’ Scantron, but neither are as user-friendly or as quick as GradeCam. I found ZipGrade to be much more frustrating than GradeCam.

I have used GradeCam to give my weekly SAT vocabulary quizzes; I have also used it to grade my self-made midterms.

I gave my students a 150 multiple choice midterm, and I was able to grade all of them in under 3 minutes (a class of 30). Now, I did not tell them that it was not for a grade, but they didn’t need to know ☺

Whenever I hear about teachers struggling with grading, I always point them to GradeCam. Using the phone app alone is reason to try it. I can walk around the class and grade them as they finish – talk about convenient!

I use the data I get from GradeCam to push my instruction. Below is a picture of the “data” board in my room. I have been tracking my vocabulary results from class-to-class and week-to-week. This is one of the ways to view GradeCam results. I really can’t explain what “standard deviation” is, but it gives that too!

On my website, I list GradeCam is one of my ‘must haves’ in my classroom.

I think that pretty much says it all.