Tag: Assignments

Learning from each other – Peer Review Assignments

To strengthen students’ written work, instructors will spend a great deal of time providing detailed feedback in the hopes that students will apply the suggestions to their next written assignment. Unfortunately, many instructors feel that their efforts to provide feedback is being overlooked or not appreciated by the students.

What if an instructor could reduce the burden of providing all the detailed feedback YET increase students engagement in the review process? Maybe even strengthen their writing skills and assessment skills in the process…

Peer Review Assignments

Think about the possibility of having students review each others work and provide each other feedback. If you read through the body of literature, you will find many supporting arguments which state that peer review in the feedback process provides many benefits to students learning.

Benefits of Peer Review

  • Ability to become more aware of alternative perspectives on a topic.
  • Lifelong learning skills in how to effectively assess another person’s work.
  • Building self-assessment of their work by benchmarking themselves against their peers.
  • Critical thinking and diplomacy skills.

Canvas Peer Review Assignments

A Canvas Peer Review Assignment allows students to provide feedback on another student’s assignment submission. Setting up an assignment for peer review is fairly simple within Canvas. One of the options when setting up a new assignment is to designate it as a Peer Review assignment. You can select to manually or automatically assign the peer reviews. There is an option to set up the peer reviews to be anonymous or you can include a rubric for the reviewer to complete as the peer review. Peer reviews can not be used with External Tool Assignments.

Peer Review options in Assignments

Students will see a list of peer reviews assigned to them within the assignment. Based on how the assignment submission is designated, the student could annotate the document, add a comment in the comment field or complete the included rubric. A student reviewing another student’s assignment would need to leave at least one comment in order for the review to be considered complete.

Students will see their peers’ reviews in the right sidebar of the Canvas course under Recent Feedback. A student can simply click on the assignment title to access the feedback.

If you would like to learn more about using Peer Review Assignments in Canvas, feel free to contact us at elearning@mtu.edu

Assignment Feature in iClicker Cloud

Do you currently use iClicker Cloud to poll students during class?…do you wish you could poll students outside of class….say after a chapter reading to gauge their level of understanding of the content?

With iClicker Cloud’s new asynchronous Assignment feature you can create low-stakes assessments that can be completed outside of class and at a student’s own pace.

Examples of when to use iClicker Cloud Assignment

  • Before class – gauge students’ understanding or preparedness for upcoming lectures, chapter readings or homework understanding.
  • During class – for small group activities.
  • After class – to support homework activities.

Setting up iClicker Cloud Assignments

Within the iClicker Cloud Instructor Website, you can create questions for the iClicker Cloud Assignment.

  1. Create your lecture slides as you normally do. Include a slide for each iClicker question. iClicker Cloud Assignment supports Multiple Choice, Short Answer and Target question types.
  2. Extract your iClicker question slides from the main presentation. A separate file that contains only question slides can be used in an iClicker Cloud Assignment.
  3. Export the question slides file as a PDF.
  4. Go to the iClicker Cloud Instructor Website and create the assignment.
  5. Add the assignment details and upload the PDF that contains the question slides.
  6. Format the Assignment. The assignment has now been added to your “Assignments” page where you are able to manage, edit, view grades and export grades to your LMS.
  7. Based on the release date that you set for the assignment, students will now be able to see the assignment(s).
  8. Scores from completed assignments can be manually uploaded into Canvas.

Student access to Assignments

Be sure to let your students know that you are now using Assignments in iClicker. A student can complete the assignment by finding the instructor’s course in their list of courses and selecting Assignments from the menu. Here is a helpful guide to provide your students on Accessing an Assignment in iClicker Reef.

If you have questions about using iClicker Cloud Assignments, Canvas, Zoom or Huskycast, feel free to contact us at elearning@mtu.edu