Assessment and workload - using tech to help the balance

I've been teaching for 8 years and as any teacher knows, there is no silver bullet when it comes to assessment. I've never got it 100% right, and still don't, but I think I'm getting closer. Here is how I am using tech to cover my assessment bases this year:

Daily:
I use iDoceo on my iPad, which is an amazing app. I import my classes at the start of the year and input my lesson objective for that particular lesson. I then assess each student with a drop down menu that I have created in iDoceo. It's a pretty simple drop down consisting of 5 levels, starting at 'confident' and ending with 'no evidence'. I can build up a picture of what my students can and can't do over the academic year. iDoceo also colour codes each level and can turn it into a percentage if I actually wanted to crunch some hard numbers.
I find that doing it this way ensures that I look at every student's work at some stage in the lesson as I need to enter one of these levels per lesson for every student. It isn't time consuming as the way the iDoceo app works makes it very quick indeed. Also because you are marking during the lesson, in front of the student, I find I am marking more accurately as I'm not relying on my memory to remember if someone can or can't do something!

Weekly:
I'm using Google Forms to make quizzes for each of my classes. I then use a script in Google Forms called Flubaroo which automatically marks each student's work AND emails them the results! This for me is massive for workload as I don't have to individually mark each answer correct or not. Using Flubaroo and Google Forms in this way also gives you data like the % score for each student and which questions they got right or wrong. You can then tell from the data if you need to go over any questions that most students got wrong.
As an added organisational point I make a copy of each quiz for each class, rather than giving all the students in all classes the same quiz file. I find that this makes working out who has/hasn't done the homework much easier.
To find out more on Flubaroo, there is an excellent, and brief video explaining how it works here:
http://www.flubaroo.com/instructional-videos
Half termly/termly:
This is my more formal assessment where I mark each bit of work at the end of a unit. The most effective and personal way I have found is to use audio marking, using an app like Recordium. Match this with Google Apps and you can share your audio feedback quickly and effectively, much more so I find than a traditional written comment.
I have blogged about how I do this here:
http://practicaledutech.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/ipad-google-apps-mark-large-volumes-of.html
So, there is no right way to assess as it is a very individual process, but this is what works for me!

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.