Grading Papers on the iPad Redux

(Go here for the original post.)

Here's an update, part experiential and part technical. The technical part is here because I hate it when people rhapsodize about doing something on the iPad that you know from experience is tricky to do and then don't tell you how it's done.

The experience: grading on the iPad now doesn't take longer (or much longer), and it's fun. [Update: It now doesn't take any longer, although it would if I were including long explanations of errors as is possible with autotext.]

Experience update

Pro:
1. I invested in a wireless keyboard, which makes the whole typing on the iPad thing much easier and with many fewer typos.
2. I like reading the papers on the iPad. It seems to be easier to get a sense of the big picture of the paper, since the .pdf conversion usually changes double space to single space.
3. I didn't time the papers this time, as I did before, but the cumbersome features that made the process longer last March have largely been eliminated.

Con:
1. There's still no Autotext feature. That means that students have to rely on their handbooks or other aids to look up what may be wrong with a sentence, since I am certainly not going to type out 5 sentences on what a comma splice is every time they write one. On the other hand, we've already talked about these things in class and this isn't their first paper, so perhaps it won't be a problem.
2. There's still a few more transfer/downloading/renaming steps than if I were using Word.

Technical

Importing the papers

First of all, it's not necessary to change the papers (which are usually in Word or some variation) to .pdf using a third-party program. iAnnotate will do that if you open them correctly.

Do NOT try to open them directly in iAnnotate unless they're already in .pdf format; they won't show up.

1. Open Dropbox. Go to the folder where you've stored the student papers.
2. Touch (click on) the paper to open it. It'll show up in the Dropbox window, but tell it to "Open in" iAnnotate. Click on the box with the arrow in the upper right-hand corner to do this. You may have to scroll down to see iAnnotate as an option when the menu for this box opens up.
3. iAnnotate will convert the file to .pdf and then open it.

Marking Up the Papers

Second, write your comments using iAnnotate's commenting features. I don't draw freehand lines and circles, since it's slower for me than just inserting comments, but it's possible to do that.

Update: In addition to using the commenting features, I now mark directly on the .pdf with a stylus. I don't do much with the stylus--circle a few words, add a "good point" in the margins--but the paper looks a little more as though it has been touched with human hands if there's handwriting on it. It's also a more immediate and "natural" way to respond it you're used to writing on paper.

1. To insert a comment, tap on the pencil icon at the side of the screen and tap on Note. You'll then have two choices: Note and Typewriter. Choose Note.

2. Type your comments in the Note space just as you would do with the Word comment feature. [Thanks to Stacey for bringing that up.] It works exactly the same.
3. Click on the minus sign to close the note when you're finished typing.
4. I used to use Typewriter for a final comment, but it shows up as a big black oblong with no text in some readers (like Adobe Acrobat). The Notes, on the other hand, seem to show up fine in Adobe, which is probably what most students have installed.

The Notes will show up in most desktop readers (including Adobe and Preview for Mac) and in iAnnotate but not in Goodreader, NoteTaker, CloudReaders, and other readers for the iPad. You can also "flatten" the annotations so that they'll be more readable. If you "flatten" the annotations, they will show up as a numbered list of comments at the bottom of the page instead of a pop-up message that shows up when students mouse over the comment.

Return the papers

Third, either re-upload the paper to Dropbox or email it to the student. You can email it by clicking on the box, which is on the left side.

But what if you want to re-upload it to Dropbox so that you can later upload the papers to a CMS? This is not an intuitive move in iAnnotate.

• File cabinet icon? No.
• Upload arrow? No. It will tell you that the file has been uploaded to Dropbox, but the file doesn't upload.

You would never guess this one (or at least I couldn't after many attempts), but here's what I found from drilling down on the iAnnotate support site:

1. Click on the file folder-like tab at the top of the document (the Document Context Menu).
2. Click on Share.
3. Click on Upload.
4. Now you'll see your Dropbox account. Click on it and your file will upload.
5. Note: It will probably upload to the iAnnotate folder rather than to the folder from which you downloaded it.

You'll still be stuck with the same filename, since the Gods of Apple Products have an insane prejudice against a Save As feature, but at least you'll have them all where you can rename them and upload them to your CMS or whatever.

Grading papers with the iPad

Read the updated post with some technical advice here:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/11/grading-papers-on-ipad-redux.html

Around the web, there've been some posts lately about grading with the iPad, including a couple of good ones by Caleb McDaniel and Michael J. Faris. I was curious about this, so I thought I'd try grading on the iPad and see how it went.

[Update: There's a new post up about this by Janet Johnson at MediaRhetoric.com; she talks about iAnnotate, which she finds easier to use than Word. She also uses some other grading apps, including GradebookPro and EssayGrader, which is sort of like Markin for the iPad.]

My initial thought was to do a whole set the usual way (comments in Word) and a whole set using iAnnotate on the iPad, but I ended up doing just a few on the iPad. It was pretty clear what the strengths and weaknesses were after that. Here's the process:

1. To use iAnnotate for grading, you first need to download the papers (if your students use Word), convert them to .pdf files, and save them to Dropbox. That took about a minute apiece. You don't have to save them to Dropbox if you don't have it; you can transfer them through iTunes, which is the official way to transfer files on the iPad, or through a transfer feature of iAnnotate.

2. Open iAnnotate on the iPad and read the paper. iAnnotate lets you insert comments in little pop-up boxes, use a pencil tool to circle items, underline phrases, and so on.

• You can use your fingers to indicate the text you want highlighted by swiping the text or pressing and holding until the program asks you whether you want to make a note or not.

• If you have a stylus, you can also write on the paper, although even my best efforts at writing letters looked like those of a 4-year-old.
• For each comment, you need to click on the appropriate icon on the sidebar (underline, make a note), click in the right spot in the text, type the note, close the note, and close the annotation menu.

3. Typing on the iPad isn't as straightforward or as fast as typing on a physical keyboard, although it does work. For one thing, if you want to use an apostrophe, you have to go to a different keyboard, although some of the usual contractions (it's, I'll, etc.) will insert themselves automatically.

4. At the end, you can upload the file back to Dropbox or mail it directly to the student. There's no "save" or "save as" feature (or at least I haven't been able to find one), but iAnnotate saves the annotated file automatically. If you like to save the graded papers with a different filename, as I do, you'll have to change the filename on your regular computer.

Note: If your students email you their papers in .pdf format and you mark them up in iAnnotate, you won't be able to save that version to Dropbox. Dropbox only accepts the annotated version if it originated in Dropbox, apparently a known issue with the two programs.

5. I used the Typewriter comment feature to write the final comment. [Note: See the updated post (above) about using Note instead.]

6. If you email the file, there are two options: one "flattens" the annotations, which means that the student sees a little yellow comment box with a number and the comments are down below, and one that the student should be able to see using the pop-ups.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

1. Draw. Most of the information I've seen lists "not carrying around a stack of papers," "no messy writing in the margins," etc. as an advantage, but since I'm collecting and returning papers electronically, that's not an issue.

2. Advantage: It's kind of cool to grade on the iPad. If I have the iPad with me anyway, I might as well carry some grading to do.

3. Disadvantage: No Word autotext on the iPad. No magic keystrokes that insert text (Alt-I-A-X). That makes a huge difference, since I use it to explain common problems and can then spend a lot more time on substantive issues.

4. Advantage: No computer to lug around. On the other hand, I have an old-ish netbook that, like the iPad, fits in my pocketbook, so it's really kind of a draw if portability is the issue.

5. Disadvantage: Grading takes longer. Total average time: if N = the amount of time that it takes to grade a paper in Word or on paper, the iPad version took me N + 9 minutes, on average. I did the math: 9 extra minutes apiece x 30 papers = time I could spend doing something else.

6. Disadvantage: Typing is less intuitive, and I noticed that my shoulders were getting all hunched up with the effort to type and not make mistakes.

7. Draw: The CMS my university uses does not play well at all with the iPad; there's no way to scroll down or upload the papers to the dropbox space in the CMS. On the other hand, if you're emailing papers back anyway, this may not be a problem.

iPad as classroom text reader: a thought experiment

As I've done more reading on the iPad, I've wondered what it might be like to use it in a literature classroom. I'm inspired partly by the posts over at Teaching, Learning, and Living with an iPad, a site that's chronicling a writing class in which all the students received iPads. Some thoughts:

• Reading on the iPad is nice. It hasn't been hard on the eyes, and the page-turning capabilities are a lot faster than those on the Kindles I've seen. Like the Kindle, it has a dictionary function, a notes function, etc.
• As it currently exists, the iPad has one advantage over a standard netbook or laptop if you use it in the classroom: no multitasking. Wait--that really is a feature and not a bug, since students wouldn't be able to Facebook while you're hoping they're following the text. That feature will disappear with the next system update, however.
• The down side is that students wouldn't be able to keep a text open and write their notes beside the text, which in an ideal world they would be doing instead of Facebooking.
• The book situation wouldn't work as it does for the tech writing class. First, in testing various e-textbooks over this past year, I learned you don't "buy" an e-textbook in the sense that you keep it permanently (or sell it back to the bookstore); you rent it for a specific period of time, usually one semester or maybe 6 months. This costs about 80% of what it would cost to buy the book. This isn't necessarily good or bad, but since lit students, unlike students in the sciences or tech writing, may want to keep their books for later reference, buying an e-textbook wouldn't make sense unless you're teaching a contemporary author whose works are under copyright.
  
• The good part about an e-textbook is that it's designed for use in a class and has navigation features like a table of contents with links, which would make navigating to specific sections easier.
  
• The good part about not using an e-textbook is that, if you're teaching a pre-1923 literature class, you'd have lots of public domain choices for texts. If you're using a text that doesn't have significant problems with/variations in editions, Project Gutenberg has lots of works formatted for Kindle, which would work on an iPad.
  
• These books wouldn't have the navigation features of a purchased e-textbook, however, and here's where mcconeghy's response to a previous post might provide a solution. Imagine that you're in class. Maybe you'd usually say something like, "Turn to page 127. How has Dorothea Brooke's perspective changed since her comment on page 45?" and you'd expect the students to be able to flip back and forth between the two. Since it'd take a while to do that on an iPad, and there aren't any page numbers anyway, couldn't you say "search for 'red bows on blue dress'" or something like that to get students to find both instances of the phrase? Couldn't the search function replace the flipping pages function?
  
• I'm a good typist, and I have small hands, but the iPad keyboard is still a challenge. It might be a challenge for students as well--any thoughts?
  
• Also, as a sad testament to the increasing irrelevance of the apostrophe, the iPad has put it on the numbers keyboard, so you have shift to that keyboard if you want to use a contraction or a possessive form. It could be that students would get faster at shifting between keyboards, or it could be that we all will start using no contractions at all and talking like Mafia dons ("I do not think he would like to sleep with the fishes"), or--best guess--R.I.P. apostrophes.[Edited to add this: Emily says in the comments that an iPod touch automatically adds the apostrophe. I just checked, and the iPad does, too. Thanks, Emily!]
  

Thoughts?

[Edited to add: I realize, too, that the whole thing would be easier just using a paper book. There should be a universal rule: whenever you have to use the concept of a workaround, the original method of using the tool/technology is probably better in the first place.]

Today's Koan: If a reference can't be cited using MLA, does it really exist?

If a reference can't be cited using MLA (or Chicago), does it really exist?

For example, say you have a Kindle or an iPad. I've been given an iPad as a present--yay!--so let's stick with that as an example. You can download books from the Kindle store on Amazon.com, if you put the free Kindle app on your iPad. You can also buy or download books from the iBooks store, including free public domain ones. The thing that doesn't come along with these nifty editions is a set of page numbers that corresponds to the page numbers in the original text.

That's not a problem with .pdf documents, since they're images of the original. You can read them and, since Sept. 30, annotate them using the GoodReader app, or read and annotate them using iAnnotate. You can copy text from the .pdf and paste it into Docs-to-Go.

So far, I like the experience of reading on the iPad. If you have a book with endnotes, for example, the endnotes are links, so you can click on the note and then click back to the text. You can write notes in both the Kindle and iBooks apps, although I haven't explored that much because it's harder than I thought it would be to type on the screen-based keyboard.

What if you want to cite a book that you've downloaded? Kindle books--for scholarly books, anyway--cost about the same as the paperback edition, and they cost more than a used copy, so if I'm going to shell out the money for one, I want to be sure that I don't need to get another copy.

The piece of advice I've found most often is "go get a print copy of the book, find the citation, and cite the page." This is probably the best advice for now, but it's a colossal timewaster and a duplication of effort to have to hunt up the book if you've already bought it. If the book is in Google Books, you could try searching for the phrase in there, but a lot of books aren't in Google Books.

APA has addressed this by suggesting that you cite is as you would any unpaginated material: "Name the major sections (chapter, section, and paragraph number; abbreviate if titles are long), like you would do if you were citing the Bible or Shakespeare." Since paragraphs aren't numbered, I would be less than thrilled to have to scroll through and count the paragraphs just so I could cite the reference. And what about paratextual elements such as epigraphs? Do they count as paragraphs when you're counting?

Some other sources suggest that you cite the Kindle location number, which would be swell if the editor of the journal you're submitting to has a Kindle and not so much otherwise.

The Chicago Manual of Style suggests just citing the Kindle edition and maybe the chapter number.

The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition floats above the fray by saying (in 5.7.18) that you should just say what kind of file it is: "Microsoft Word file, JPEG file" or whatever. Presumably you could say "Kindle file" or "iBooks file" there, too, although all of the examples given are for short pieces. That wouldn't provide much information if you were trying to cite from a book-length source. As EduKindle asks, "Why is it so hard to cite a passage on a Kindle?"

Beats me. I'll be happy when MLA gets this straightened out, almost as happy as I'll be when they decide to jettison those #@%$& angle brackets that they make you put around a URL (see 5.6.1) as though we'd all just stare helplessly at an http:// prefix without knowing it was a web address unless it was safely contained in a set of angle brackets. [Edited to add: tenthmedieval has a good explanation for this in the comments.]