I'm doing an experiment with my students. I teach a blended French class and have taught fully online classes as well. The experiment comes from a phenomenon I noticed in my face to face time with students. When I pass back corrected papers, the first thing some students do is compare their grades with one another. "I did better than you did this time." And I feel certain many students cringe inwardly during this time.
This never happens in online classes, as grades are visible only to the student and the teacher. So finally the little light bulb appeared over my head. "Why not create the same environment for my blended class?" Complete confidentiality of graded work.
One way of accomplishing this would be to put all assignments in a digital format. But that wasn't really my objective. It is, after all, a blended class. And I have found that students don't want to spend ALL their time with keyboards and screens. Sometimes, they want to use pen and paper. And sometimes I like them too. But I can correct and return those papers digitally - all I have to do is scan the papers. At our school, the photocopiers scan to email, so that's an easy way to digitize the papers. Or if I'm at home, I can scan them with my iPad with an app such as DocScan. I then open and annotate them in an app like Notability. From there, I can either email the document to the student or, what I have done so far, upload them to my LMS, Schoology. Complete confidentiality.
I don't know if this model is sustainable or even a good idea. But I think it's worth a try. I'll keep you posted.
