Grading Made Easy with Diigo & Jing

This is a guest post from Rebecca Johnson.

Both Diigo and Jing have been written about on numerous occasions here at the Free Technology for Teachers blog, but I wanted to share my experiences using both tools when grading assignments. I teach an information literacy course for the college where I work as a librarian. This course requires students to create an annotated bibliography as their final project; but there’s one issue that I continually run into time and time again - students would submit their sources throughout the quarter, but when it came time to put the bibliography together, they never could find their sources again which left them scrambling to search for additional content. This past quarter, I tried something completely different, and it worked beautifully!


Diigo:
Students were required to create a Diigo account at the beginning of the quarter, and when searching for books, journal articles, or scholarly websites, they would save their sources using the diigolet tool (a bookmarklet). As the image indicates, students were required to provide me with an APA citation, and their summary annotation within the description field of the bookmark area. When students were finished searching for that week, they would submit their Diigo library URL to me, which made it very easy to continue grading their work as they advanced through the course.

Jing:
Once students submitted their work to me through Diigo, I needed some way of grading it visually so they would know exactly what mistakes were made in order make the necessary changes and complete the final project. I’ve used Jing in the past to create screencasts, but my number one use is screen capturing. I mark-up student work and provide the screen capture URL for them to view. The image indicates an example of what a student missed in their Diigo library and how I marked it up using Jing. 

This combination of grading has worked much better than I ever thought it would, and as an added bonus I have even had students ask how to download Jing for their own computers!
-------
Rebecca Johnson teaches Information Literacy at Harrison College and is transitioning into an Instruction and Emerging Technologies Librarian position with Manchester University.  Follow her online at BeccaLovesBooks (Twitter @beccalovesbooks). 


Editor's note: Jing Pro is scheduled to be shut down in February 2013. TechSmith (the producers of Jing) do offer other screen capture products. You can find a list of other screen capture tools here.