St Andrew's College using OneNote & Moodle for student assessment

This post has been re-blogged from Sam McNeill's StAC e-Learning Stories blog. Microsoft is excited to share this fantastic example of technology simplifying and improving everyday processes for teachers and students.

One of the great things about Microsoft OneNote is the ease with which teachers can provide feedback to students on their work, helping them to develop their ideas towards the submission of assessment.

However, as the internal assessment season ramps up in 2015 a number of teachers at St Andrew's College have approached Tom Adams and I about how to “lock” OneNote notebooks to prevent students modifying content after the submission date. Whilst there are some work-arounds, such as password protecting sections or moving them to a “read only” section in a teacher’s OneNote notebook, these are not always easy or intuitive.

Together, Tom and I thought about a better workflow for teachers and students to use and settled on the following simple process:

1. The teacher creates an “Assignment” task in Moodle setting the due date to be when all students need to have the assessment completed and handed in by.
           a) The option to allow “late” submissions exists within Moodle too, clearly showing to the teacher in red how many hours/days overdue the submission was. This could be useful in scenarios where students were away for legitimate reasons.

2. The student exports either their page, section or entire OneNote Notebook into a PDF file on their local computer.

3. The student goes to their Moodle course, clicks on the assignment and then drag ‘n’ drops the PDF file for upload and submission.
           a) The teacher can optionally include to have all students “sign” the authenticity agreement by clicking the “accept” each time they submit an assessment.

4. Once the due date is reached, the teacher can bulk download all of the submissions for offline marking, moderation storage purposes or printing and returning.

This process is outlined in the video below!

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtGjm0mAkJI:0:0]

By using this process, a number of things can happen:

  •  There can be no dispute about when the assignment was submitted
  • There can be no “losing” the submission because it’s stored on Moodle
  • All assignments are stored in one place with a single click to download all assignments into a folder for marking/moderation.
  • This also reduces the need for the teacher to “harvest” the submissions from a variety of sources that students may have submitted by e.g. email, printed and left at the teacher’s desk or office etc.
  • Students can be required to “sign” the authenticity statement for every assessment they submit within Moodle.
  • Moodle supports the use of https://turnitin.com/ – an online tool for verifying the authenticity and originality of a submission. Whilst this costs, it would allow students to improve their work before a final submission and also support teachers in ensuring the submission is the original work of the student.

One reason St Andrew's College uses technology in the classroom is to prepare students for tertiary study and the workforce. The vast majority of tertiary institutions now require students to submit assessment online – by teaching our students to manage their time and to become accustomed to this form of assessment submission, they are being prepared for life beyond St Andrew’s.