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How to Grade Papers Faster

If you knew how to grade papers faster, you’d be able to leave school on a Friday afternoon with an empty bag!

I’m dreaming, right? Can anyone actually do that?

I can. I haven’t graded one assignment outside of school hours in 5 years. Never. Not one.

Look, during school hours, I work hard. But after school, no, sir. That is my time.

Here’s how I get everything done during the school day:

Design your assignments to be easy to grade.

Use multiple choice questions. The standardized tests in science are mostly multiple choice questions but they’re not rote memorization questions. Design your multiple choice questions so that they test application skills. For example, “Your rover on Mars encountered an area with a lot of seismic activity but no volcanic activity. What kind of boundary is it?”
Include rubrics in your assignments so you don’t need the extra step of attaching it to the document.
Limit the length of the assignments. “Write 70-100 words to answer this question…”
Remember your job is to grade, not to edit. In science, I grade students on the quality of their answers, not on their writing ability. I may circle misspelled words or grammar, but I don’t belabor it.
Use self-grading assessments. Google Forms is amazing. Here’s a free assessment on Google Forms you can try out.

Let technology work for you.

Use Doctopus to score Google docs.
Use Google Forms for multiple choice assignments. Set them up to calculate the grade for you. When everyone is done with the assignment, open the spreadsheet and copy the grades into your grade book. Done.
Keep a file of commonly used comments. For all written assignments or lab reports, I compose a doc for myself that contains the comments I anticipate using. “Use your data to support your conclusion,” is one I use a lot! Today, I used “Tension at a normal fault causes the hanging wall to move downward compared to the foot wall” about 30 times. Then, when a student makes an error, you don’t have to type your comment all over again – just copy and paste.

Maximize your time in school.

Check your email before school, at lunch, and before you log off for the day. Leaving it open all day is an invitation to be disturbed.
Work in your classroom during your prep if you can. Better yet, close the door. I love my coworkers and I love hanging out with them. But get your work done.
Go to the copy room/mail room/main office or where ever you need to go once a day. I make a trip around the school at lunch – drop off forms, pick up mail, make my copies, whatever I need to do. If I didn’t get it done today, I’ll do it tomorrow.
Decide how long you will grade for before you take a break. I’m usually in the 20-30 minute range, then I take a 5 minute break and then go back at it until the end of the period.

Image credits:

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

Women in Science – Rosalind Franklin

Since March is Women in History month, let’s celebrate some women in science. Rosalind Franklin was an English chemist who worked with x-ray crystallography to lay the foundation of Watson and Crick’s knowledge of the structure of DNA.

In the early 1950s, Franklin worked with Maurice Wilkins on x-ray crystallography at King’s College. X-ray crystallography is a method used by chemists to determine the three-dimensional structure of a crystallized molecule. The crystallized molecule is placed in an x-ray tube and is struck with x-rays. X-rays can pass through crystals and interact with the electrons of the atoms in the crystal which causes the x-rays to diffract or scatter. The pattern of scattered x-rays is recorded as dark marks on film and gives clues about the structure of the molecule.

In 1944, Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty isolated DNA and discovered that it contained genes that passed on genetic information, but the structure of DNA and how it worked was difficult to determine. Scientists did know that DNA was composed of nucleotides of deoxyribose, phosphates, and bases of adenine, guanine, thymine or cytosine, but how those nucleotides were arranged was still unknown. Many research scientists around the world were attempting to determine the structure of DNA but none had any success.

Franklin’s most famous photograph was taken using x-ray diffraction of DNA and is known as Photo 51. Franklin was not the first person to use x-ray diffraction on a pure fiber of DNA, but she conducted her experiments differently than previous scientists. Franklin pumped hydrogen gas through a salt solution to keep the DNA fibers surrounded by water which reveals more of the structure of the DNA. Her image was also taken after 62 hours of exposing the DNA to x-rays and revealed far more details than previously achievable.

Franklin’s Photo 51 was able to show that DNA was made of a double helix in which one twist consisted of 10 nucleotides. She also was able to show that the bases AGCT were on the inside of the helix and the phosphate groups were on the outside.

Some controversy ensued as a result of the image. Maurice Wilkins showed Franklin’s DNA image to researchers James Watson and Francis Crick without Franklin’s knowledge (see source 1). Watson and Crick went on to use the information contained in the image to develop their own model of DNA which is now the structure that we understand. Watson and Crick were also able to predict semiconservative replication, later proven by Meselson and Stahl.

Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for their discoveries of the structure of DNA. Franklin died in 1958 of ovarian cancer at age 37 and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

Image credits: Image of Rosalind Franklin is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Sources:

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/photograph-51-rosalind-franklin-1952

Amazing Animal of the Week – Lava Lizards!

This week’s Amazing Animal of the Week are the lava lizards of the Galapagos.

Lava lizards range in size from 2-4 inches plus tail. Males are more colorful and have a crest of spined scales running down the length of the body. Females have a cheek patch of salmon to red when they reach reproductive maturity.

Super abundant on the Galapagos, lava lizards are very territorial. They are this week’s amazing animal of the week because of a fantastic display that male lava lizards put on to ward off other males. When a male lava lizard is afraid that another male will encroach on his territory, he does a strange dance that resembles pushups. This dance makes the male appear larger and stronger and appears to be an attempt to dissuade other males from starting a fight. Intruding males might participate in a push up contest.

What do you think? Pretty amazing, right?

Lava lizards are preyed upon by hawks, snakes, and might even be cannibalized by other lava lizards.

Previous Amazing Animals of the Week:

Image of lava lizard is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

Space Rocks – A mini-unit about meteorites

Meteorites and impacts are fascinating. My students love them. Here are some lesson plans I use to engage my students in learning.

Impact Lesson Plans

Instead of calling this unit my “Geoscience” unit, I call it my Meteorite unit. Kids are instantly more engaged and curious. Here are some pieces I like to include:

Engaging with phenomena – Show students various rocks but include one or two meteorites in the collection without telling students what they are. Let them explore the rocks with a magnet (meteorites are magnetic and very few Earth rocks are). Have them r calculate the density of each rock (meteorites are more dense than Earth rocks). You can purchase some small and inexpensive pieces through your regular lab supply company or through ebay.
Impact lab. Use controlled experiments to try to create impact craters that resemble simple or complex craters on the Moon.
Meteorite information presented as either a slideshow, a picture walk or informational text. Students should be able to describe the development of impact theory as a cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs and identify several important meteorite impact sites on Earth.
Lab – Is it a meteorite or a meteorwrong? What are the differences between earth rocks and space rocks?
Enrichment for advanced students – Use meteorite samples to conduct chemical tests to identify which kind of meteorites they are. Take a virtual tour of Meteor Crater. Use Google Earth to measure the sizes of other craters on Earth.

When do you teach impacts?

The science of asteroids, meteoroids and comets can be learned in nearly any earth science unit. When you’re teaching the rock cycle, include the differences between earth rocks and space rocks. When you’re teaching geologic time, include impact driven mass extinctions. When you teach relative and absolute dating, include overlapping craters on the Moon. Asteroids, meteoroids and comets fit naturally into your solar system and astronomy unit – How are they formed? How are they observed? How are their orbits calculated? They are also good for addressing controls and variables if you do a scientific method unit – Have students conduct controlled experiments to try to create impact craters that resemble simple or complex craters on the Moon.

Standards-based

Not only are students fascinated by meteorites and impacts, learning about them can hit several of the middle school and high school NGSS:

- MS-ESS2-2 – Construct an explanation based on evidence for how geoscience processes have changed Earth’s surface at varying time and spatial scales.
- HS-ESS1-6 – Apply scientific reasoning and evidence from ancient Earth materials, meteorites, and other planetary surfaces to construct an account of Earth’s formation and early history.
- Science and Engineering Practices – Constructing Explanations and Designing solutions
- Science and Engineering Practices – Science models, laws, mechanisms, and theories explain natural phenomena
- Crosscutting concepts – Stability and Change

Tech Tuesday – Use Doctopus to Save Time!

Have you heard of Doctopus? It’s a great Google extension that can save you a ton of time grading papers. Here’s how to use Doctopus to save you grading time!

Create an assignment in Google Classroom.
Create a rubric in Google Sheets. The rubric can be as elaborate as you want but three rules must apply: 1. Cell A1 must be empty. 2. The scoring points must be in row 1. 3. The criteria must be in column A.
Create another Google Sheet. I name them with the class period and the name of the assignment so that I can find it later. Click “Add on” and then search for add ons. When you find Doctopus, install it.
In your Google Sheet, click “Add ons” and then select Doctopus. You’ll first need to set up Doctopus for this assignment.
In the Doctopus menu, choose “Select Mode.” Choose “Ingest a Google Classroom Assignment” then select your class.Then choose the assignment from the drop down menu.
Select the assignment you want to grade then click “Ingest Assignment.” Doctopus will bring all of the submissions from your Google Classroom into your new grading super-station.
There are a few things you can do now, and they are all visible in the new grading panel that appears on the right side of your screen. You can search Google Classroom to see if any students submitted their work since you last ingested the assignment. You can add a coteacher who will have access to the submissions and will be able to do some of the grading for you. But the coolest thing you can do is add a Goobric. A Goobric is what Doctupus calls your rubric. If you created it in step 2, it’s ready to be imported. Click “Add a Goobric.” You’ll be taken to your Google Drive and then you can select the rubric that you just created.
Click “Attach” to connect the rubric to your students’ work.
Now you’re ready to grade. To grade the first student’s paper, click the link in that student’s row that says “Assess Document.”
When you open a student’s document, the rubric is on the same screen for you. Just click the box to assign the student a grade and it will be recorded on the spreadsheet. Hitting “Submit” sends the document with the rubric printed on it to the student’s email and enters the grade into your spreadsheet. It also moves you to the next student so you don’t need to keep opening and closing documents.
Adding the formula =SUM(N2:Q2) into cell L2 allows the points for each criteria in your rubric to be added together. Of course, if your rubric has more than 4 criteria, you will need to change Q2 to which ever box the last criteria’s score is in.

Doctopus takes a few minutes to set up and I can see why that might be a turn off. But it saves so much time because it adds the rubric to the assignment and sends it to the student while also keeping a record of grades for you.

Do you use Doctopus to save time grading? What’s your best grading secret?

Free Atomic Structure Interactive Notes

I’m offering my atomic structure interactive notes for free! It’s a 14 slide Google Slide resource with drag and drop features to help my students learn about atomic structure. The slide show includes:

atomic structure
protons, neutrons, electrons
atomic number, atomic mass, mass number
isotopes
drawing an atom

Why am I offering this for free?

I’ve been frustrated whenever I’ve tried to have students copy notes, especially while working virtually and hybrid. Students need to pay attention to what I’m saying, but they’re so busy trying to be sure to copy the exact wording of the definition I’ve written that they can’t pay attention. Hey, the last 52 weeks has been hard enough. Let’s not make it any harder than it has to be. Click here to get your Free Atomic Structure Interactive Notes!

How do you create Interactive Google Slides?

I have several interactive Google Slide sets in my TpT store because I use them all the time. If you want to create your own, first create a background for a slide that includes questions y want students to be able to answer or guided notes. Then, on the side of the slide, add text boxes that students can drag and drop onto the correct place in the slide. The beauty of this is that students can pay attention without stressing over what they have to write. Then, when they go home to study, they have everything they need right in front of them. Here’s a video if you’re not convinced: If you have any units that you think an interactive notebook would work for, I’d love to hear about it!

Why are glaciers blue?

Glaciers store almost 70% of the fresh water in the world and cover 10% of land area on Earth. If all of earth’s glaciers melted, the ocean level would increase 230 feet worldwide. 97% of the glaciers in the United States are in Alaska. Glaciers are beautiful, fragile environments, but do you know why glaciers are blue?

Glacial ice is formed from compacted snow when the amount of melt in an area is less than the amount of snowfall. Compaction over time reduces the space between molecules of water and the ice crystals reform larger and larger as air bubbles are squeezed out. Glacial ice crystals can be as large as baseballs.

The color of a glacier depends on how it interacts with light. Glacial ice with a lot of air bubbles appears white. When all or nearly all of the air bubbles are squeezed out of glacial ice, the ice absorbs a small amount of red light which makes it appear blue.

Icebergs, which are pieces of glaciers that have broken off and are floating in the ocean, can sometimes be green. The green color is caused by the presence of iron oxide or rust in the iceberg. Iron is found in Antarctica’s rock dust, so green icebergs carry dust from Antarctica.

Smoke from the Australian brushfires in 2020 turned some of New Zealand’s glaciers brown and yellow. Scientists fear this will cause melting to accelerate.

Featured image Photo by Vince Gx on Unsplash

Glacial ice Photo by Simon Berger from Pexels

Amazing Animal of the Week – Death Valley Pupfish

The Death Valley pupfish is a small species of fish found only in Death Valley. What makes the Death Valley pupfish this week’s amazing animal of the week is that they live in water that is 4 times more salty than even the ocean and can live in water that ranges in temperature from 32-116 degrees Fahrenheit.

Death Valley is one of the driest (less than 2 inches of rain per year) and hottest locations on Earth (record setting 134 degrees Fahrenheit in 1913), making is a less than obvious location to find fish. They live in Devils Hole, an oasis in Death Valley with average water temperature of 92 degrees. Devils Hole is more than 500 feet deep, but the pupfish only live in a shallow area on the edge.

They are small, about 1.5 inches long, and silver colored with bands on their sides. Males turn bright blue during mating season which is late spring through early autumn. Pupfish are called pupfish because they frolic like puppies in the shallow water of Devils Hole which rises and falls up to 6 feet with seismic activity as far away as Japan.

Some scientists think these pupfish are the remainders of a fish species that live in Lake Manly which dried up 11000 years ago. Other scientists believe that the pupfish were brought to Devils Hole accidentally by humans or birds as recently as 1000 years ago.

Previous Amazing Animals of the Week: The Banana Slug and the California Condor.

Image of pupfish is the work of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain.

More engagement strategies for distance learning

Do you need more engagement strategies of your distance learning students?

Are your remote students paying attention during class? Or are they, like mine, creeping their cameras up so all you can see is their ceiling? Are your students, like mine, unable to answer simple questions when called on (i.e. “What letter should we use for Window’s Peak” or “Which color on this map represents oceans”)? Are you competing with cell phones, video games, etc.? Do you hear “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you” far more than is reasonable?

We’ve been teaching hybrid for a few months. We work hard to deliver engaging content that is accessible for students, but I’m struggling with engagement. Maybe it’s just the mid-winter blues, or maybe plate tectonics isn’t as fascinating to 13 year olds as it is to me. A few months ago, I published 10 Ideas to Increase Distance Learning Engagement, and the info in that post is still true – build relationships, be present, give choice, provide feedback. But I feel like I’ve hit a wall. Students are barely paying attention when they are remote (the face to face kids have been, honestly , fantastic). I need more engagement strategies for distance learning. And if I need it, it’s possible that you need it.

Review of familiar strategies

Some things experienced teachers have been doing to build engagement all the time:

Build relationships with students. Students work harder for students that they like and that they think like them.
Maintain a predictable classroom routine. Bellringer, mini lesson, independent or group investigation, closure – that’s my daily routine.
Provide choice. This has been widely unsettling for everyone and kids in particular have little that they can control. Let them have some control. Perhaps offer to let them choose groups to work with, or choose which assignment to complete.
Differentiate.
Digitize. Use the technology available to you. Try Answer Pad, Badaboom, Edpuzzle, Edulastic, IXL, PearDeck.
Allow students to work in groups, even remotely. We’re all worried about social-emotional learning. Give your students the opportunity to build connections with people.
Use brain breaks. 2 minutes of jumping jacks is far more effective than a 2 minute lecture on the benefits of paying attention.
Use phenomena to help students engage with the topic, not just with your class.
Provide feedback quickly. Let them know what they need to do to improve next time. Don’t let assignments be the last time they think about the subject.

More engagement strategies

This might not be new ideas for you, but maybe you need a reminder of how to use them and why they’re important. I know I do (and my students do).

Switch it up. Use varying modalities while you instruct. Keep your routine consistent, but provide lots of visuals and graphics as well as music and opportunities for students to draw or act. Let students create a video for small children explaining the layers of the earth. Have them create papier mache or edible models of the earth’s layers. Ask them to write a song about the layers.
Don’t depend on digital everything. Let them cut out pictures or draw the water cycle on paper. If you have to, put folders in front of your school for remote kids to pick up a few days in advance.
Hands on learning. Hands on learning of course is very challenging in hybrid days, and I know I’ve depended on digital simulations a lot. Let your students assemble some ingredients (or have them pick up kits from school) and do a few chemical reactions (make pancakes) or different concentrations of salt water or make some rock candy or a density column. Definitely check out Science Bob and Steve Spangler Science for labs your kids can do with household ingredients. Find one you can do next week. Give your students a few days warning to assemble the ingredients and then watch them engage. I know this is difficult and presents many challenges, but I also know that every year, students tell me their favorite part of science is the hands on learning. What are they going to say this year?
Gamify. Easy to use gaming platforms include Kahoot, Blooket, Quizlet, Gimkit, Boom cards, escape rooms. Everyone is more engaged during a game, and games are definitely not fluff. Kids learn when they’re playing. (Even adults learn when they’re playing.) Let them play.
Be kind to yourself. And to them. We are all in challenging circumstances and Maslow’s hierarchy reminds us that mastering Punnett Squares isn’t as important as your health and safety.

To sum up…

As I’m writing this, it’s been 50 weeks. We have come so far from where we were back in March of 2020 in terms of pedagogy and data. Use what we’ve learned to keep moving forward and setting the bar, for yourself and for your students, higher.

Activities for Middle School Science Classrooms for March

Ah! It’s almost spring! I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for some sunny days, budding trees, and melting snow! In my classroom, I like to change things up a bit, sort of do some spring cleaning. Here are some resources you can use in your middle school science classroom this March.

Saint Patrick’s Day animated banners

I use these for my Google Classroom header, for my daily checklist slides, my Google Form banners, and basically anything digital I send out to the kids. Lots of variety here – even some spring time banners.

Rainbow Science – the Physics of Light Waves

Everyone loves a rainbow, but do your middle school students know how they are formed? This is not one of those primary grades rainbow activities, and if you’re looking for an arts and crafts activity, this isn’t for you. This is a study in the physics of light waves with an in depth, middle school appropriate, exploration of refraction, reflection, and dispersion as well as frequency and wavelength. This resources is a Google Slides Drag and Drop activity.

The Science of the Seasons

I’m perennially shocked by how many students (and adults) think that summer is warmer because the earth is closer to the sun. My response is always, “Think about the southern hemisphere. They are having winter now.” Perplexed faces, interesting dialogue, a little phenomenon that we can dig into a few times a year. I like to do this activity on the equinoxes because I love a little egg balancing trick (which, of course, you can do any day of the year). This resource is a Google Slides Drag and Drop activity. It includes a graphing activity using Google Sheets to compare the amount of sunlight throughout the year at different latitudes.

Women in Science

March is Women in History Month, and here’s a middle school activity to celebrate women in science this March. I think we owe it to our students to remind them that science isn’t just for men. This resource includes pics and short bios of a dozen women in science and some guided questions. I use it as a picture walk and hang the photos around my room but it could easily be adapted for remote students as well.

Spring Flowers Genetics Activity

Review and reinforce dominance and recessiveness with this spring flower activity. Toss a coin to see if your spring flower inherited the dominant or recessive phenotype for 9 different traits. Use digital drawing tools to draw your flower. Drag and drop features allow students to record their data easily.

St Patrick’s Day Customizable Magic Pixel Worksheet

This magic pixel worksheet can be customized for your own questions and answers. So if you’re currently teaching the rock cycle, you can use rock cycle questions.

What kinds of activities do you use in your middle school science classroom for March?