For the remainder of my AP review season, I am leveraging a new platform called Peergrade.io and it allows just what it says.

In a regular class setting, my students do anonymous peer reviews using paper rubrics and I guide them question by question (A-G). They then underline their peer’s papers where they locate the answers and raise their hands to ask questions. In this way, we learn as a group and it’s worked for me.

This web-based platform is like many others where you give students a join code for your class and students populate in your course with their email addresses. Click create a class to make a new one and it will give you a class code to send to students.

Once you’ve created a class, you can jump into it to see your roster.

CREATING A QUESTION WITH RUBRIC IN PEERGRADE.IO

To create a new question or prompt, you give it a title and type away. You can add stimulus images, video, or whatever your heart desires to get your kids writing/creating.

Next, it will direct you to create your rubric. Because I assigned two free response questions, the sections are titled FRQ #1 and FRQ #2.

You will see that I can edit each question in the rubric creator to drop in what the correct responses should be. You have a few options if you look below. You can choose whether to grade by text responses, on a grading scale, or Yes/No. Because each of my questions are worth one point, I choose Yes/No and made the values 0 and 1.

Next, you are ready to make it live or assign for homework with cut-off dates. Because I am in review season, I leave all of them set to live so that students can go back and do any that are outstanding in the grade book.

CHANGING SETTINGS TO YOUR PEERGRADE ASSIGNMENT:

Once your assignment is created, you might want to toggle some settings. You see here the list of current assignments that I posted for my classroom when back in my assignment screen.

In the advanced features, I am able to allow students to flag any reviews that they feel are questionable so that I can review, respond, and correct if necessary. You can also choose to allow student anonymity when peer reviewing, which is AWESOME. Note that this is a paid version after your 1-month free trial.

In the submissions tab, you can choose how many papers your students need to peer review in order for the assignment to be completed. It auto-sets to 3. I have the kids do 1.

What’s also cool is that you can allow for multiple methods of submission. Of the students who have imported images, I have to say that I am very impressed with the image quality and ability to load quickly if I need to review flags. Did you also notice the option to submit a screencast? Pretty coo, but not necessary for this particular task.

You can also allow for flagging if you want students to have the ability to raise stink about the score they received. I encourage this because I want them to fight for the points.

Finally, if you are making these in advance, you can set when they become live, or make them unpublished.

PEER REVIEWING IN PEERGRADE.IO

Once assignments become live, you can see which students have submitted assignments, are currently peer reviewing, are reacting to feedback that they’ve received from other students, and are completely done. You can see what that looks like below.

If I want to see what student scores are, I click on results and it gives me their % score. If more than one student peer graded, it will give you an average.

Flagged comments will populate and you will get an email that there are some for you to review. (One per day, instead of every flag which is nice). You can see who flagged it, who the reviewer is, and the justification that the student wrote to gain their point back.

I can then weigh-in and choose to override a previous peer-grade, and provide comments. The kids have to actively review their previous assignment to be able to flag it. They most likely get an email when their papers are graded telling them to review and potentially flag.

Lastly, You have the ability to actually weight students submission grades with their peer editing abilities to hold them accountable. Students have the opportunity to rate their feedback. I set mine to 90% student submission and 10% peer edit, but you can choose whatever. It will spit out the summaries for all students which is fun for all you statistic nerds.

FULL DISCLOSURE: The web-based app will give you one month free, until you refer another teacher and then it will “buy” you another month. So this is kind of a perfect solution for my class until the AP exam. However, I am going to submit this for the budget next year and see what happens. I really like it.

Here are two unsolicited reviews I’ve received from my students about Peergrade.io:

“I actually really like it, aside from waiting on the feedback, the platform is efficient and has all the key points! I was able to leave feedback when I needed and got it when I needed it which was nice. It also didn’t require a lot of trial and error because it was so easy to use. Overall it was great:) thank you for implementing it :)”

“I like the peer review a lot. It’s user friendly and it’s gonna be super useful.”

Anyway, it appears to be a Danish initiative, and a darn good one. It’s given me a little pep in my eLearning step.