iPad & Google apps = mark large volumes of work effectively and efficiently

We are near the end of term and all of my Year 9 students (that's about 120 of them) are just finishing some Adobe Flash project work for me. This set me thinking about the task of giving them some good feedback, but also doing it in as time efficient way as possible.

Here is the workflow I came up with. You will need a Google Apps account, and an iPad with Google Drive, Goodreader (make sure it is linked to your Google Drive account) and Recordium installed on it:

1 - Open Recordium and record audio feedback for your first student.

 2 - Enter the name of the student. It needs to be the name so the student can find it later. Recordium even auto-capitalises the first and surnames! Saves a couple of seconds!!

 3 - Slide across the file name and find the export button. Press 'Open in Goodreader'. I had originally thought to upload straight to Google Drive, but putting it in Goodreader saves you lots of time in the upload process:

 4 - Once the file is open in Goodreader, you should see a list of your student names on the left hand side:

5 - Meanwhile, go back to Recordium, delete the recording you have just transferred to Goodreader (it is saved here, no need to take up more of your iPad's memory), and repeat steps 1-5 for each student:

6 - Once all is done, make sure that you have set up a shared folder in your Google Drive. It should be shared with your class:

7 - Select all of the named student feedback files at once. This is where Goodreader comes in useful as you would have had to of done this one by one if you exported directly to Google Drive from Recordium:

8 - Select upload and navigate to your Google Drive account, find your shared folder and put all of the files in there in one go:

That's it. Each audio file should now be in the shared student folder on Google Drive. All the students have to do is find their file, download and listen.

The only draw back to this is all students in the class can hear each other's feedback, but sometimes this is a good way of doing things as students can compare their feedback with others.