When watching the No Red Ink webinar hosted by Jeff Scheur, a few points stood out. The first was that the teacher developed his own grammar manual! While I think it is amazing that he compiled his own manual to make the feedback process easier for himself and his students, it brought up some questions for me. What happens when students move from class to class as they get older and teachers use different conventions for correcting grammar? We have discussed the importance of using a professional language in many of our MAC courses. This professional language is important so that everyone in the field is able to communicate with and understand one another. The same is true in this situation. If Scheur teacher is using his numbering system, but next years teacher uses that dreaded red ink to make what I would consider "traditional" editing marks, will students be confused?
After his description of his editing system, he began to talk about noredink.com. I think this website is amazing! When I worked in an elementary school, the kids were required to use a program called Success Maker. This program was very similar to noredink.com in that it catered its lessons on English and math to the individual student. The students received nearly instant feedback and they loved being able to use the computers. I, however, liked several things about noredink.com better than Success Maker. Success Maker had a time limit. The students worked for 20 minutes and then they were automatically signed out of the program. While in some of the lessons they couldn't move on from a problem until they got it correct, they were not given hints or help with correcting their initial mistakes. The school also had a policy against the teachers helping the students with Success Maker because it was supposed to reflect what the student knew without assistance. In contrast, noredink.com gives students the opportunity to go back to the questions at the end of the quiz and really investigate what they did wrong and why. To me, this is a much more helpful exercise.
A theme that kept coming up in this webinar was the importance of timely, useful feedback. I agreed with Scheur and some of the other viewers of the webinar when they said that students should be required to respond to the feedback that is given. I know that I get upset when I spend time looking through and commenting on a student's work only to see them toss it in the trash immediately after I return it. If students are asked to look at the feedback, interpret it, and fix their mistakes, they will learn a great deal more and the time that teachers pour into grading work will be well worth it.
